Train’s engineer blamed in L.A. rail crash

Commuter train officials said Saturday that their train engineer’s failure to heed a red light signal apparently caused the catastrophic head-on crash on Friday afternoon that claimed at least 25 lives.

As rescuers continued the emotionally grueling work of extracting bodies from a tangled mountain of steel and dozens of families maintained vigils for the injured in hospital waiting rooms, Metrolink commuter train officials accepted responsibility for the worst Southern California train wreck in more than 50 years.

“We want to be honest in our appraisal,” Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell somberly told reporters at the scene.

The unusually swift announcement came as the National Transportation Safety Board and other agencies were still gearing up their investigations. Saturday afternoon, the NTSB said it was reserving judgment on the cause of the collision, and a union representing 125,000 rail workers — though not those who work for Metrolink — called the assignment of blame “terribly premature.”

“The signals might not have been working (properly),” said Frank Wilner of the United Transportation Union, noting that officials had not yet examined “black-box” and other crash-site evidence. “We don’t know if there was glare, or if he succumbed to a heart attack or a stroke.”

The engineer, who died in the crash, had 10 years of experience working for Amtrak and more recently a private firm, Veolia Transportation, which has contracted with Metrolink to provide engineers since 2005, officials said. The Metrolink train he drove Friday carried 225 passengers at the time it collided with a Union Pacific freight train.

Friday’s crash boosted Metro-link’s fatality record to one of the worst in the nation, records show.

Beyond the death toll, which continued climbing Saturday, 135 passengers were injured, 40 of them critically, when the freight train’s locomotive slammed into the Metrolink engine, driving it inside the shell of the first seating car.

The process of identifying those killed and notifying relatives continued through the day, according to the coroner’s office. By Saturday night, the names of 21 people killed in the crash had been released.

At a news conference earlier, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said the last of the dead had been pulled from the wreckage of the freight train’s 11 boxcars and the three Metrolink cars, which had been bound from downtown to the city’s northern suburbs. The mayor quoted a firefighter who he said had told him “it was very, very difficult, it was like peeling an onion, to find all the victims.”

Waiting and hoping

Across the region, friends and relatives of the injured waited for news.

Alan Buckley’s wife and grown children spent hours searching for him Friday night. They knew the 59-year-old mechanic took the train every afternoon from his job in Burbank to his home in Simi Valley.

When they didn’t find him at the crash site, they called area hospitals. After eight hours, the exhausted family gave up for the night.

But Buckley’s daughter-in-law was restless. She drove to the crash site at 4 a.m. and finally managed to talk to officials at the makeshift mortuary.

They confirmed the family’s worst fear: Buckley was dead.

Oaks Christian School English teacher Paul Long, 54, died Saturday afternoon at Los Angeles County-USC hospital soon after being taken off life support. His wife, Karen, and his son, Devin, who were both injured during the crash, were at the hospital with him. The family had been taking the train home to Moorpark after attending the funeral for Long’s mother in South Carolina.

As word spread of Long’s condition, friends, relatives, students and teachers prayed for him — at the hospital, in homes throughout Moorpark and even on the football field where the high school team was playing.

“We believe in the power of prayer,” said Jim Lee, the high school chaplain. “We believe that every prayer is answered. It just might not be answered the way we want.”

The family of Donna Lynn Remata, 49, who also died in the crash, mourned her Saturday. “My mom was awesome,” said her daughter Tiffany “Koga” Remata, 17. “I have no words. I can’t describe her.” Her mother, who worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, had many friends, but Koga said she was still amazed by the calls that poured in to the family’s Simi Valley home Saturday expressing condolences. “I was like, ‘Wow, Mom. Nice’.”

At the UCLA Medical Center, where eight injured passengers were being treated, about 40 friends and relatives gathered in a special waiting room. Dr. Henry Gill Cryer, chief of trauma surgery, said hospital staff had provided pizza for relatives who were waiting for medical updates.

As the drama of the wreck’s aftermath continued to play out, the most pressing question was how the Metrolink engineer missed the red signal.

‘Text’ rumor unconfirmed

A Los Angeles radio station reported Saturday that several teenage train aficionados said they had received a text message from the engineer shortly before the crash. But the NTSB said it was treating the report with caution, noting that similar accounts had circulated after a crash in Boston but were found to be inaccurate.

“We’ve heard reports to that effect, but we have nothing to confirm,” said NTSB board member Kitty Higgins.

The engineer was certified specifically on the Los Angeles—to-Simi Valley route, his regular assignment, and was familiar with signal locations, officials said.

Moreover, the Union Pacific freight train and the 3:35 Metrolink train out of Union Station in downtown Los Angeles routinely passed each other near Chatsworth.

“That is a daily freight train. It’s a regular traveler on those tracks,” said Francisco Oaxaca, a Metrolink spokesman.

Many passengers described how their quiet commute had been dotted with chatter about the coming weekend until it was punctured by instant terror and carnage shortly before 4:30 p.m. Friday.

Passengers flew into one another’s laps; nearly severed limbs became tangled together, and blood spilled along the cars’ aisles.

In some cases, the living were trapped beneath the bodies of the dead.

The first sound was “a huge explosion,” said Greg Tevis, 59, who regularly rides the train from his downtown law office.

“People who had their legs under the seats got broken legs. People were moaning; you had to get them off the train. One lady was trapped under a seat, and we asked her if she wanted us to pull her out, because we didn’t know whether her spinal cord was hurt. She said to take her out.”

In the minutes before the first firefighters arrived, passengers who were able began to drag out the injured, and neighbors ran to the scene to help.

“People were standing around like zombies,” Tevis said. “You had to get them off the train. Some guy was coming down the aisle screaming that the train was on fire and we were all going to die.”

This was compiled from reports by the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.