The dead were slumped in their seats, the wounded were moaning in agony and the gunman was about to reload when three suburbanites saw their chance.
Kevin Blum, Michael O'Connor Jr. and Mark McEntee, all commuters from Garden City, tackled and disarmed the burly man who shot up their Long Island Rail Road car with a semiautomatic pistol."Kevin said, `Let's get him!' " O'Connor said Wednesday on NBC's "Now." "Kevin got on top of him. I grabbed his right arm. The other guy grabbed his left arm."
The massacre on the rush-hour train Tuesday evening ended as the gunman - identified by police as unemployed, Jamaican-born Colin Ferguson - paused to reload his 9mm Ruger for the second time with a fresh clip of 15 bullets.
Shrieking passengers were piling up at the end of the car, which was still moving, doors closed, into the Merillon Avenue station.
It was either get the gunman or get killed.
"It was six of one, half a dozen of the other," recalled O'Connor, 32. "There was no way out."
The 38-minute ride from the frenzy of the city to the sanctuary of the suburbs had been routine at first. O'Connor and Blum, both from the white-collar world of Wall Street, chatted about going to the gym or grabbing a beer.
Then there was a commotion.
"I could hear a pop, pop, pop. It sounded like firecrackers," O'Connor said.
Commuters scrambled to the ends of the car as the gunman methodically emptied two clips. Then he stopped to reload, his gun pointing skyward. O'Connor looked into his eyes.
"He was facing me. I could hear him say, `You're going to get it. You're going to get it,' " O'Connor said.
The three men sprang into action.
"I wish I had stopped him sooner," Blum, 42, told the New York Post. "I knew he was going to reload and kill more people, so me and the other two guys just started walking toward him, and grabbed him and held him down in his seat."
"He had a blank look - like he knew he had done something wrong," said Blum, a father of four who had moved his family to Long Island from New York City a year ago.
When the train stopped, off-duty policeman Andrew Roderick was on the platform waiting for his wife, who was aboard but un-harmed.
"Passengers fled the train yelling, `There's a man in there with a gun! He's shooting people!' said Roderick, a three-year veteran of the LIRR police force. "I had one eye out for my wife and one eye looking for the gunman."
He found the three men holding the suspect, who Roderick said was "perfectly calm, didn't say a word." He dashed for his hand-cuffs.
"They are the real heroes here," Roderick said of the three commuters. "It was their quick thinking that saved this from becoming even more of a tragedy than it is."