When Billie W. Turner retired in late March after a quarter century with the MTA, she was barely five months removed from one of the most horrific on-the-job encounters a subway train operator can experience.

On Oct. 24, while at the controls of a No. 7 train in Queens, she fatally struck a 21-year-old man who police said was on the tracks at the 82nd Street-Jackson Heights station. He was standing, she said, in a spot where “I couldn’t see him until I got right up on him.”

“I can still hear the sound,” Turner, 60, told THE CITY. “Everything was just ‘Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!’”

The 6:25 a.m. “12-9” — the MTA’s radio code for a person under the train — was the third of Turner’s career and among 241 such collisions in 2023, when 97 people were fatally struck by subway trains, according to agency data provided to THE CITY.

The statistics reveal that the number of trains making contact with people has surged nearly 30% since 2018, when 189 were hit, including 68 fatally — even as the current weekday ridership of more than 3 million remains well below the pre-pandemic mark of 5 million-plus.

“Now, it can happen at any moment, there is no narrative as to when, where or why,” Turner said. “So when you’re operating, you have to think, ‘OK, it can happen.’”

The MTA did not say how many people have been hit by trains in 2024, though five people were killed within 48 hours during a particularly grim March stretch — including three who officials said died of suicide.

The death toll included Jason Volz, 54, who police said was pushed in front of an oncoming No. 4 train on March 25 by an emotionally disturbed man at the 125th Street stop. Less than 24 hours later, 16-year-old Neisa Herod-Cross was killed by a G train at the 4th Avenue-9th Street stop in Brooklyn after sources said she and three other teens who escaped had been walking along the tracks and on a tunnel catwalk. 

“Very rarely do you have more than two a day,” said Canella Gomez, a Transport Workers Union Local 100 vice president who represents train operators and conductors. “So anytime you have multiple people coming into contact with the trains, it’s not a good thing at all.”

‘It’s Completely Traumatizing’

Janno Lieber, MTA chairman and CEO, distinguished between those who enter the tracks voluntarily and those who are pushed, but acknowledged that train crew members have to deal with the psychological fallout of every collision on the tracks.

“I don’t want our workers to go through that, I don’t want them to be attacked,” Lieber told THE CITY. “But I also don’t want them to have that traumatic experience, so let’s respect the folks who are doing public service and don’t put them through that.”

While MTA statistics show that the percentage of people being struck by trains as a result of a criminal act has actually dropped from 15% in 2020 to 7% last year, experts believe that the overall growth in the number of people finding their way onto the tracks is indicative of the toll mental illness is taking on the transit system.

A 2023 MTA report on track trespassing — done in partnership with the Psychiatry Department at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine — found that mental illness accounted for 20% of the 1,364 instances of track trespassing the previous year, second only to unauthorized occupancy of the tracks, which includes going onto the tracks for no apparent reason.

In an effort to cut down on the number of people going onto the tracks, the MTA has been testing metal platform-edge barriers at four stations, looking into technology that detects people and objects on the tracks — including lasers, artificial intelligence, machine learning and thermal sensing — and will eventually install platform screen doors at three stations.

THE CITY reported in June that the MTA has also begun testing blue lights at a few stations that have a history of people going onto the tracks as a way of gauging whether the lights have a psychologically calming effect that can deter suicide attempts.

In addition, the state is expanding the number of cops-and-clinicians outreach teams that focus on the subway’s most troubling mental-health cases.

Multiple train operators told THE CITY that the possibility of spotting someone on the tracks is terrifying when there is little time to react.

“You try to do everything you can to avoid this, but unfortunately there are certain scenarios where you can’t,” said Jamar Pearson, a train operator who has been involved in five collisions in 13 years as a motorman. “We operate at high speeds and these trains, they do not stop on a dime, unfortunately.”

Pearson’s most recent collision on Oct. 28, 2022, was not fatal — the train he was operating on the No. 4 line around 2:40 a.m. struck a 23-year-old man, breaking his right leg, at the Bedford Park Boulevard-Lehman College station in The Bronx, police said.

“Maybe he had dropped his phone, maybe he had slipped, but when I came around the corner, he was right there at the entrance of the station,” Pearson said. “It’s a completely traumatizing experience, no matter how many times it happens.”

As she adjusts to retirement, Turner said she will not miss the stress of moving New Yorkers on the subway — and trying to avoid them on the tracks — especially after what she experienced in October.

“The last few months, I was like, ‘Don’t let it happen again,’” she said. “Please,  please, please, please, don’t let it happen again.”