Man was contemplating jumping to his death until a commuter stepped in
On his regular morning commute from Pickering to Union Station three weeks ago, Ryerson University student Aeron Soosaipillai happened to glance out the GO train window and noticed a man teetering on the side of a rail bridge over St.Clair Avenue East.
The sight gave him a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
"No one can just be chilling there like that," said Soosaipillai, recalling what was going through his mind at the time as he received a safety award from Metrolinx Thursday at its headquarters on Front Street West.
As the train pulled into the Scarborough GO station that day, Soosaipillai says he got the sense he was the only passenger to notice the man, so he burst out of his seat.
"The doors took a while to open and when they did I ran down the platform toward him. I took off my bag and my jacket walked across the tracks and started talking to him," he said.
The man did not want to talk, Soosaipillai said. Instead, the man swore at him and continued edging farther away toward the middle of the bridge.
Soosaipillai kept talking to the visibly distraught man.
Man handed Soosaipillai his son's baby shoe
"I told him about my problems. I said we can get through this together," he said. By that point, police had started closing off the road below.
It's at that point when the man handed Soosaipillai something very personal.
"It was a baby shoe" belonging to the man's young son, he said.
"He said, 'Just do one thing for me. Tell him that I love him,'" Soosaipillai recounted.
"I can't do that for you. You have to tell [your son] that every single day of your life," Soosaipillai remembers replying.
That exchange was enough to persuade the man to accept Soosaipillai's helping hand.
"He put his arms up and at that point I just grabbed him," he said.
Hoisted back to safety, the two men sat on the side of the tracks and cried.
"I was thinking about him and his kid at that point, you know what I mean?" Soosaipillai said.
"Then I pointed to the rail and said, 'You're never going back there okay? Things are going to go up from here.'"
'The whole world needs people like Aeron'
Soon after, GO Transit officers and Toronto Police attended to the man. Soosaipillai grabbed his bag and started walking off and that's when the gravity of the situation hit him.
"I was really shaking and the whole day I was very emotional and overwhelmed," he said.
"The whole world needs people like Aeron," said Metrolinx spokesperson Anne Marie Aikins at the award ceremony on Thursday.
"It was an inconvenience for him to get off that train and he did."
GO Trains and their infrastructure are sadly popular destinations for people looking to commit suicide, she said.
"Often, unfortunately, it's a means people use to end their lives when they're desperate, and this man was clearly desperate," she said.
"Hero" is a label Soosaipillai finds cumbersome.
"It's not something I could have ever pictured myself doing. I'm not sure how I did it," he said. while receiving his award.
He ended the ceremony with this message:
"It's in all of us. Even when you think it's not. We should just try our best to do the best."
