An aspiring actress was pulled to her death by a subway train at the Union Square station in Manhattan over the weekend, the second dragging death of a rider on a platform this year.

The 21-year-old woman, identified by her family as Helen McDonald-Phalon, was on the downtown 6 train platform around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday when she came into contact with a train, according to an official with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

She got caught between the train car and the platform and was pulled under the train, the official said. She died at the subway station.

The platform wasn’t crowded, and the MTA is investigating what happened, the official said.

Ms. McDonald-Phalon moved to New York City from South Carolina to become an actress, according to her mother, Ann McDonald-Phalon. She worked at ThinkGeek in Manhattan and recently moved to Brooklyn, her mother said.

“She was an amazing, beautiful light, and I’m devastated,” Ms. McDonald-Phalon told The Wall Street Journal.

In February, a 39-year-old man was killed after he was dragged by a subway train into a tunnel at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, officials said. Initial reports said his bag got caught on a moving train and dragged him under, but an MTA official said Sunday the bag wasn’t the cause of him getting caught on the train.

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The man was dragged into a staircase and then into a tunnel, where he struck an electrical power control box, according to an New York Police Department official at the time. He was declared dead at the scene.

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