The wife of a man who died by suicide on the tracks of a train station in the Bronx sensed her husband was unwell moments before his death.
Fernando Balbuena grabbed his 5-year-old daughter and leaped in front of a southbound No. 4 train at the Kingsbridge Road station after making a troubling phone call to his wife.
Niurka Caraballo sensed something was wrong and rushed to the train station where she learned that her husband had died just moments before her arrival. Her daughter, Ferni, managed to escape relatively unharmed, rescued from underneath the train by strangers.
“She couldn’t understand what he was saying,” said family friend Luis Sanchez of the distressing phone call. “It wasn’t coming through … But she got the feeling that something was very, very wrong.”
Witnessed described the horrifying scene of Balbuena, 45, choosing to end his own life with his young daughter in his arms. “I heard him telling the wife that, ‘You look out for the other two kids, I’m gonna take her to school,’ and then he said, ‘I love you,'” one witness said of the incident.
“He was a good husband, a good father, a good provider, and a good man,” Caraballo, 41, said through a translator of her late husband. “I had no idea.”
