Decorated two tour Iraq veteran saved man from train

Decorated Army officer honored for saving fallen man from oncoming train
San Francisco Chronicle (MCT)
By Carl Nolte
Published: September 5, 2014

After two tours of combat duty in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, the morning commute on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system from Orinda, Calif., to San Francisco must have seemed pretty routine to Maj. Adam Czekanski one day last winter.

He got to the station just in time and could hear a train coming into the station. But then he saw something else. A man standing at the edge of the platform began slowly leaning forward and then toppled onto the tracks, directly in front of the oncoming train.

The commuters on the platform froze in horror, "as if they were paralyzed," Czekanski said later. But he knew exactly what to do. He ran from the top of the escalator to the edge of the platform and jumped onto the tracks to help the fallen man.

"He was lying there flat on his back," Czekanski said. "I pulled him away from the tracks and got him under the lip of the platform. I know it sounds like a cliche," he said, "But I did what I had to do."

It was much more than he had to do. On Thursday, Czekanski, a major in the Army Corps of Engineers, received the Soldier's Medal, the Army's highest award for valor in a noncombat setting.

The incident occurred just after 7 a.m. Jan. 24. The victim, later identified as Adrian Malagon, had what BART police later thought was a seizure.
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