People make mistakes, and "in the heat of the moment" is exactly the time when people don't have time to rather all the facts and rationally evaluate them for l

People make mistakes, and "in the heat of the moment" is exactly the time when people don't have time to rather all the facts and rationally evaluate them for likely outcomes. I've accepted what I thought at the time was a relatively low risk to myself to extricate someone, and it later turned out to have been vastly more dangerous than I'd thought originally. I made a quick assessment of the risks and my capabilities, was wrong, and got lucky. (I generally weight my own survival disproportionately highly vs. that of others, too, so I don't think I'm really reckless.) I judge people much more harshly for situations where they have a long time to reflect and choose not to. In this case, he probably either thought the train was slowing/stopping, and thus he'd have more time, or that he could extricate the person more quickly than he did. It might be the case that what he did had a high expected chance of success and he was just unlucky, or he had wrong information in the instants before, or overestimated his abilities, or underestimated the difficulty, or just had bad judgement; we probably won't know.