NYC- The lifeless body of a 64-year-old Brooklyn man rode the subway unnoticed for hours - making up to six complete runs of the Q line before a straphanger finally noticed.
Eugene Reilly, who died of a heart attack, likely got onto a Brooklyn-bound Q train at W. 34th St. just before 1 a.m. Thursday. He wasn't found until 7:15 a.m. when a curious commuter touched his shoulder, trying to wake him.
"Don't they check the trains?" Reilly's stunned widow, Patricia, asked yesterday. "Someone should have noticed him all those hours."
The Q train travels just over 15 miles through Manhattan and Brooklyn. Its tracks run close to the Reilly's home in Midwood, dealing the widow a constant reminder of her husband's lonely death.
"I can't understand it," she said, her voice cracking with grief. "The train passes here, so he must have passed the house back and forth like he was a homeless person."
Eugene Reilly, a 35-year mail handler, worked the 4 p.m.-to-12:30 a.m. shift. The father of three always headed straight home so when he failed to arrive Thursday, his wife knew something was wrong and started calling hospitals.
The Vietnam veteran was discovered by a woman riding the Q train as it pulled out of the 14th St. station. He was removed from the subway at Times Square, officials said. Reilly had been sitting up in his seat, which transit officials said was likely the reason their workers left him alone for so long.
"The policy is that if someone is sitting up, employees are not allowed to touch them," said Deirdre Parker, a city transit spokeswoman.
A different transit official said employees probably saw Reilly, who was in the last car of the train, but thought he was sleeping. Dozens of riders also must have seen Reilly and done nothing.
"People sleep on the train all the time," an official said. "No one thought anything of it."
Subway ridership is light between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. But it picks up significantly by 7 a.m. on weekdays when New Yorkers make their way to work.
"We're very saddened by the whole situation," said Pat McGovern, a postal service spokeswoman. "We're sad to lose a member of the postal family."
Reilly hauled sacks of mail within the postal facility on Ninth Ave. between 28th and 30th Sts. He had long battled heart problems and underwent bypass surgery several years ago, his family said. He was not the first dead commuter to go unnoticed on a city train or bus.
When Ignacio Mendez, 36, died on the No. 1 train in 1999, thousands of commuters failed to notice him before cops tried to revive him at 96th St. A year later, Alexsander Davidovich, 61, of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, sat dead on a B1 bus for about 45 minutes before a bus driver nudged him.
Patricia Reilly called her husband "a good man ... a good father."
"I wish I could have him back," she said.
