captainsblog | Why look! It's a scary black guy!

He must be up to no good, right? I mean, he's wearing one of those things:

So if you were a paranoid white guy on a subway platform, you'd have every reason to be suspicious, right? You certainly wouldn't want to feel unsafe in your personal space, would you?

Fortunately, the guy who encountered this dude the other day wasn't paranoid. Just hurt- and in need of help. And he got it, scary hoodie and all:

Steven Love was headed down the stairs Thursday afternoon on the outbound side of the Utica Street subway station, on his way to his job as a cook at the T.G.I. Friday's in Williamsville, when he first noticed the man ahead of him.

Love, 27, looked down for a second and then looked back up -- in time to see the man suddenly collapse and fall off the platform onto the tracks.

There were several dozen people on either side of the station, Love noted. But no one seemed to be doing anything.

"He hit his head real bad," Love recounted to The Buffalo News. "His nose was bleeding. He was out. He was unconscious. He wasn't responding to anything."

Love lay down on the ground close to the edge of the subway platform "to see if I could grab him and pull him," he said.

But he couldn't reach the stricken man.

"So I had to go down," he said. "It was one of those moments where you don't think. You react."

The father of three jumped down to where the man lay motionless.

"At that time," he said, "I saw the train coming."

It seemed that the train operator didn't see them at first.

"Then he started blowing the horn," Love said.

Love grabbed the unconscious man and lifted him up. He couldn't get him all the way up, so he flipped him up. A woman standing nearby then grabbed the man and pulled him up.

"I hopped right up after that," Love said.

At the same moment, the train operator, Jose Ramirez, a 10-year veteran, activated the emergency brakes.

Moments later, everybody was safe, but the almost-victim was injured from the fall and got taken to the hospital. The hero later showed up to visit him at ECMC, but only after finishing his subway ride to get to his job in the suburbs (and calling them ahead of time to let them know he was going to be late).

Are you listening, George Zimmerman? Do you have a different opinion about urban fashion, Geraldo? "Love thy neighbor" should be (color) blind, not (cracker) dumb.