Headline: Subway joyride ends with arrest
Publish Date: 05/14/1993

New York (AP) -- Keron Thomas was a subway buff, hanging around train 
stations and crew rooms, making friends with workers, asking 
questions and, above all, watching. By all accounts, he was a fine 
student indeed.

Transit officials on Monday accused the 16-year-old of posing as a 
motorman and taking a 10-car subway train with hundreds of passengers 
on a two-hour, 45-mile ride on the system's longest line Saturday.

He made all the stops, safely delivered all his passengers and was 
just two stops away from completing a regulation run when he rounded 
a curve too fast, tripped the emergency brakes and couldn't reset 
them, the transit agency said.

Even then, Transit Authority spokesman Jared Lebow said, no one 
suspected the teenager was an impostor. Transit officials thought he 
was a real motorman by the name of Regoberto Sabio.

But when he was driven to the Transit Authority headquarters in 
Brooklyn for drug and alcohol testing -- routine after drivers are 
caught speeding -- he panicked and bolted. And that's when transit 
officials got suspicious.

 Thomas allegedly called into the TA and, posing as Sabio, 
volunteered for overtime.

Thomas, a sophomore at Automotive High School in Brooklyn, was 
charged with reckless endangerment, criminal impersonation, criminal 
trespassing and forgery for allegedly possessing a fake transit ID 
card.