Date: 3/3/2009
By KEVIN FREKING and DAISY NGUYEN
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) — A commuter train engineer text messaged a promise to a teenage railroad fan — “I’m gonna do all the radio talkin’ … ur gonna run the locomotive” — minutes before a crash that killed 25 people in California last year, according to documents from federal investigators.
The transcript of text messages sent and received by engineer Robert Sanchez were released Tuesday as the National Transportation Safety Board opened a two-day hearing into the Sept. 12 collision in the Los Angeles suburb of Chatsworth that also injured at least 130 people.
Investigators sketched out the days and minutes leading up to the deadly crash between the Metrolink train and a Union Pacific freight train that ended up on the same shared track and slammed head-on at 40 mph. Drivers could see the oncoming train for about five seconds before the wreck occurred.
Investigators described a rash of safety violations, from a stop light that went unheeded to cell phone use and furious text messaging — actions that could have caused the collision.
Federal investigators said Sanchez sent and received 43 text messages and made four phone calls while on duty that day, including one that he sent 22 seconds before the collision. Investigators said the large number of text messages was not uncommon for the engineer in the days leading up to the crash.
Sanchez was killed in the collision.
The texts indicated he had allowed the unidentified teenager to ride in the cab several days before the crash, and that he was planning to let him run the train between four stations on the evening of the crash.
“I’m gonna do all the radio talkin’ … ur gonna run the locomotive & I’m gonna tell u how to do it,” Sanchez wrote in one text.
Unauthorized ride-alongs are considered a serious violation of safety regulations.
After the crash, two teenage train buffs told KCBS-TV they received a text message from Sanchez minutes before the crash.
In an interview with investigators detailed in the newly released documents, the teenager acknowledged he was in the locomotive cab within a week before the collision but said the train was out of service and Sanchez did not allow him to approach the controls.
He said he met Sanchez last May through a group of friends who were also rail fans. He said he and Sanchez communicated by phone and text messages once or twice a week, and that they mostly talked about train operations.
Investigators said there was no sign of mechanical error involving the Metrolink train that was carrying 220 passengers.
“All the evidence is consistent with the Metrolink engineer failing to stop at a red signal,” investigator Wayne Workman told the NTSB’s Board of Inquiry.
Investigators also found that the conductor of the Union Pacific train received and sent numerous text messages while on duty. The conductor tested positive for marijuana, but he was not driving the train at the time of the crash.
The NTSB panel focused on cell phone use by train crew members; the operation of trackside signals designed to prevent collisions; and oversight and compliance with safety procedures during the crash.
Robert Heldenbrand, the conductor of the Metrolink train, contends the signal light was actually green as the train left the station about a mile from the crash site. However, Workman said the signal in question could not be viewed clearly from the station.
Officials with Connex Railroad LLC, the contractor that provides engineers who run Metrolink trains, said it was possible to see a green light from the station, but the train had to move farther up the track to see whether it was red. They took exception to the assurance the light was red. They also said the speed of the train indicated that the engineer was under the impression he would not have to stop.
Heldenbrand also told investigators he had warned a supervisor months before the deadly crash about Sanchez’s on-duty cell phone use. He said he followed up with the same supervisor two days before the collision and was assured his concern would be addressed.
His contention is the basis of dozens of negligence lawsuits that allege Connex knew about the cell phone use but did nothing about it.
Rick Dahl, a representative of Connex, told NTSB’s Board of Inquiry that the company had a strict policy against use of cell phones. When that policy went into effect in September 2006, officials stopped and boarded trains to check their employees’ cell phone use. In one instance, Dahl said Sanchez’s cell phone rang as he was interviewing him.
“I told the engineer he was in violation of our policy and that I was going to take an exception to that,” Dahl said. “The engineer told me he knows the policy and forgot to turn it off when he stowed it away in the morning.”
Board member Kitty Higgins said she was troubled by records indicating a few problems with the engineer and crew before the accident.
“It raises questions for me about what the heck else was going on out there,” she said.
Higgins asked Connex officials what they were doing to ensure that what occurred on the Metrolink train was an anomaly when it came to following company and federal policies.
Company officials said if employees are intent on getting around the rules, “there’s not a lot we can do.”
“If you have an employee that’s not going to comply with the rules, it’s very difficult. But we have stepped up our game,” said Tom McDonald of Connex.
Higgins acknowledged that Metrolink policies prohibiting cell phone use and ride-alongs, “but unless you have effective steps for getting people to comply with them, they’re meaningless,” Higgins said.
The crash prompted a federal ban on cell phone use by rail workers and led Congress to pass a new law requiring so-called “positive train control” technology that can stop a train if it’s headed for a collision.
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Nguyen reported from Los Angeles.
____
On the Net:
NTSB: http://www.ntsb.gov
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Chicago train teen puts alleged trip on MySpace
Date: 10/24/2008 2:56 PM
CHICAGO (AP) _ Transportation officials in Chicago say they first learned about allegations that an 18-year-old operated a commuter train after the teen apparently put pictures of the unauthorized ride on his MySpace page.
Metra spokeswoman Judy Pardonnet says someone called the agency about two weeks ago to tip them off about the pictures. She says the page has since been taken down.
Pardonnet says the engineer who allegedly let the teen operate the train had been suspended. Two other engineers who allegedly allowed the same teen to enter their locomotive cabs on other routes have also been suspended.
Pardonnet says an investigative hearing is scheduled for next month.
Metra hasn’t confirmed any specifics about the incidents, including on what lines they allegedly occurred.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Train engineer texted 22 seconds before LA crash
Date: 10/1/2008 10:07 PM
By DAISY NGUYEN
Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ A commuter train engineer sent a cell phone text message 22 seconds before his commuter train crashed head-on into freight train in Southern California last month, killing 25 people, federal investigators said Wednesday.
Cell phone records of Robert Sanchez, who was among the dead, show he received a text message a minute and 20 seconds before the crash and sent one about a minute later, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a news release.
The finding led Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph H. Boardman to announce an emergency order prohibiting use of personal electronic devices by rail workers operating trains and in other key jobs. The order must be published in the Federal Register to take effect. Spokesman Rob Kulat said that would happen “soon.” California regulators have already enacted a ban.
Investigators are looking into why Sanchez ran through a red signal before the Metrolink train collided with a Union Pacific train Sept. 12 on a curve in the San Fernando Valley community of Chatsworth. The time of the final text suggests it is unlikely he had become incapacitated for some reason.
The records obtained from Sanchez’s cell phone provider also show that he sent 24 text messages and received 21 over a two-hour period during his morning shift. During his afternoon shift, he received seven messages and sent five.
Sanchez sent his last text message at 4:22:01 p.m. According to the freight train’s on-board recorder, the accident occurred at 4:22:23 p.m.
Metrolink board member Richard Katz said in an interview that the NTSB told his agency that another engineer on a Metrolink train has been suspended for sending a text message from his cell phone at about the same time as the Sept. 12 collision. That engineer was not identified.
Katz said Metrolink officials don’t know whom the other engineer was texting.
Metrolink’s engineers are supplied by a contractor, Veolia Transportation. A spokeswoman for the company, Erica Swerdlow, declined to comment on Katz’s statements, saying she couldn’t discuss personnel records. But she did say that the company has a strict policy on cell phone use and that anyone who violates it will face discipline.
NTSB investigators continue to correlate times from Sanchez’s cell phone, the train recorders and data from the railroad signal system, officials said. The cellular records were subpoenaed from his service provider, but his actual phone was not found in the burned wreckage.
“I am pleased with the progress of this major investigation to date,” acting NTSB Chairman Mark V. Rosenker said in a statement. “We are continuing to pursue many avenues of inquiry to find what caused this accident and what can be done to prevent such a tragedy in the future.”
NTSB spokesman Terry Williams declined to release information about who was exchanging text messages with Sanchez or the content of the messages.
In the days after the crash, several teenage train enthusiasts told a reporter that Sanchez sent them a text message just before the collision. Federal investigators spurred by the media reports interviewed two 14-year-old boys, who they said cooperated in the investigation and provided their cell phone data.
One of the teens showed KCBS-TV a message from Sanchez, which had a 4:22 p.m. time stamp. The message read: “Yea … usually (at) north Camarillo.” The Metrolink 111 train he was operating stops in Camarillo, northwest of Chatsworth.
The collision, which also injured more than 130 people, occurred on a track shared by both freight and commuter trains.
Investigators said Sanchez was supposed to stop and allow the approaching freight train to switch onto a parallel track, but instead went past the red signal and crossed the closed switch, putting the commuter train on a collision course.
The Metrolink train was coming around a curve at 42 mph and the freight train was coming out of a tunnel at 41 mph.
Federal investigators said the engineers of each train had no more than four or five seconds to react before the crash. The freight engineer activated the emergency brake two seconds before impact, but brakes were never applied on the Metrolink train.
Given the speed of the trains and the time each engineer had to see the other, a collision at that point could not have been prevented.
___
Associated Press writer John Rogers contributed to this report.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By DAISY NGUYEN
Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ A commuter train engineer sent a cell phone text message 22 seconds before his commuter train crashed head-on into freight train in Southern California last month, killing 25 people, federal investigators said Wednesday.
Cell phone records of Robert Sanchez, who was among the dead, show he received a text message a minute and 20 seconds before the crash and sent one about a minute later, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a news release.
The finding led Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph H. Boardman to announce an emergency order prohibiting use of personal electronic devices by rail workers operating trains and in other key jobs. The order must be published in the Federal Register to take effect. Spokesman Rob Kulat said that would happen “soon.” California regulators have already enacted a ban.
Investigators are looking into why Sanchez ran through a red signal before the Metrolink train collided with a Union Pacific train Sept. 12 on a curve in the San Fernando Valley community of Chatsworth. The time of the final text suggests it is unlikely he had become incapacitated for some reason.
The records obtained from Sanchez’s cell phone provider also show that he sent 24 text messages and received 21 over a two-hour period during his morning shift. During his afternoon shift, he received seven messages and sent five.
Sanchez sent his last text message at 4:22:01 p.m. According to the freight train’s on-board recorder, the accident occurred at 4:22:23 p.m.
Metrolink board member Richard Katz said in an interview that the NTSB told his agency that another engineer on a Metrolink train has been suspended for sending a text message from his cell phone at about the same time as the Sept. 12 collision. That engineer was not identified.
Katz said Metrolink officials don’t know whom the other engineer was texting.
Metrolink’s engineers are supplied by a contractor, Veolia Transportation. A spokeswoman for the company, Erica Swerdlow, declined to comment on Katz’s statements, saying she couldn’t discuss personnel records. But she did say that the company has a strict policy on cell phone use and that anyone who violates it will face discipline.
NTSB investigators continue to correlate times from Sanchez’s cell phone, the train recorders and data from the railroad signal system, officials said. The cellular records were subpoenaed from his service provider, but his actual phone was not found in the burned wreckage.
“I am pleased with the progress of this major investigation to date,” acting NTSB Chairman Mark V. Rosenker said in a statement. “We are continuing to pursue many avenues of inquiry to find what caused this accident and what can be done to prevent such a tragedy in the future.”
NTSB spokesman Terry Williams declined to release information about who was exchanging text messages with Sanchez or the content of the messages.
In the days after the crash, several teenage train enthusiasts told a reporter that Sanchez sent them a text message just before the collision. Federal investigators spurred by the media reports interviewed two 14-year-old boys, who they said cooperated in the investigation and provided their cell phone data.
One of the teens showed KCBS-TV a message from Sanchez, which had a 4:22 p.m. time stamp. The message read: “Yea … usually (at) north Camarillo.” The Metrolink 111 train he was operating stops in Camarillo, northwest of Chatsworth.
The collision, which also injured more than 130 people, occurred on a track shared by both freight and commuter trains.
Investigators said Sanchez was supposed to stop and allow the approaching freight train to switch onto a parallel track, but instead went past the red signal and crossed the closed switch, putting the commuter train on a collision course.
The Metrolink train was coming around a curve at 42 mph and the freight train was coming out of a tunnel at 41 mph.
Federal investigators said the engineers of each train had no more than four or five seconds to react before the crash. The freight engineer activated the emergency brake two seconds before impact, but brakes were never applied on the Metrolink train.
Given the speed of the trains and the time each engineer had to see the other, a collision at that point could not have been prevented.
___
Associated Press writer John Rogers contributed to this report.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Rail collision altered lives in and outside train
Date: 9/20/2008 1:52 PM
By JOHN ROGERS
Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ It was shaping up as a perfect afternoon when Kipp Landis climbed aboard the doomed Metrolink 111 train at Union Station.
Landis had managed to get away from his law office early, giving him just enough time to catch the 3:35 p.m. train to Moorpark to coach his 5-year-old son Jett’s soccer team. Along with his briefcase, he was carrying a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts for his players.
Before leaving the station, train engineer Robert Sanchez, a diabetic, phoned in his dinner order to a deli just down the street from Metrolink’s Moorpark station, the last stop on his run. He told Hub Hoagies ‘N More owner Randy Richardson he’d be there about 4:30 p.m. to pick up the roast beef sandwich — no onion, no tomato, extra light mayo and Italian dressing.
Neither Sanchez nor Landis would make it to that final stop.
Sanchez would die in the cab of his locomotive after driving through a red light and head-on into a freight train, killing 24 passengers. Landis would join many of his fellow passengers at an emergency room, fighting for his life.
The tragedy of Sept. 12 would forever alter the lives of hundreds of people, from the 222 on board to those who should have been on the train but missed it, to the relatives of riders who were killed, to the veteran first-responders who labeled it the most horrific thing they’d ever seen.
For Landis, the ride home began uneventfully with him taking his usual seat in the train’s first car.
“It was a beautiful day, it was perfect,” he recalled, describing one of those idyllic, sun-splashed Southern California afternoons seen on postcards.
A Metrolink rider for nearly 13 years, he ignored warnings of friends who called the front of the train the “suicide car.” He figured he’d be safe as long as he sat with his back to the engine so that he wouldn’t pitch forward if the train hit something. It never occurred to him that the train might run head-on into an oncoming locomotive going 40 mph.
The first 45 minutes of the ride were uneventful. Landis chatted with a young woman he worried would doze off and miss her stop.
She got off at the Chatsworth station, and about two minutes later — 4:22 p.m. — the 42-year-old attorney and Moorpark planning commissioner heard a gigantic bang.
“The next thing I remember, I was telling myself to breathe,” Landis said from his hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center last week.
Minutes after the crash, Dr. Marc Eckstein was pulling up to his San Fernando Valley home when he heard a bulletin on the radio about a train crash.
Eckstein, medical director for the Los Angeles Fire Department, put the car’s emergency lights and siren on and raced to the scene 10 minutes away. A veteran of earthquakes, deadly fires and a 2005 Metrolink train crash that killed 11 people, Eckstein was stunned by what he saw.
“I’ve been doing emergency medicine for 25 years,” since he was a teenage paramedic in New York in the 1980s, said Eckstein, 44. “I have never seen so much carnage like this in one place in my career.”
Firefighters from nearby Station 77 could see smoke rising from the freight train’s locomotive as they arrived. It was engulfed by flames and two of its crew members were trapped inside and frantically pounding on the windshield for help.
“That was a challenge, getting through that front windshield, because it’s essentially like bulletproof glass. And they got those guys out, saved their lives,” said fire Capt. Thomas Moore, 49. He said firefighters try to focus on moments like those rather than dwell on the people they couldn’t save.
Near the fire, the Metrolink’s locomotive was embedded in the first passenger car. Eckstein could see bodies of several riders ripped to pieces and intertwined with metal debris from the train. Some were stacked on top of injured passengers.
Among the dead was Alan Buckley, 59, who may have been Metrolink’s biggest fan. He was riding from his home in Simi Valley to his job as a mechanic for the city of Burbank since 1992, the year the agency inaugurated commuter rail service.
His father had been a railroad switchman and he had been fascinated with trains since he was a child. He loved trains so much that he once sent his mother a postcard of the one he rode with the words: ‘This is the train I take back and forth to work. The greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.’”
“And that’s what ended up killing him,” said his son, Jeff Buckley, his voice choked with emotion.
Like Landis, Buckley had been seated in the front car. He rode in the back on the way to work and in the front on the way home because that’s where his buddies sat.
Jerry Romero should have been in the train’s second car, but he wasn’t.
He decided at the last minute to drive to work that morning so he could pick up his new bicycle. He was at a Studio City bike shop when his frantic father called to find out if he was all right.
“Somebody made the statement to me about my being lucky, how I should be thankful, be happy,” said Romero, 43. “But what I’m wondering is when I’m going to feel that.”
Had he been on the train, he said, perhaps he could have helped some of the injured.
“It’s a hard feeling to get out of your mind,” he said.
Landis is unsure how long he was unconscious, but when he awoke he was trapped in the wreckage with a pair of firefighters standing above him, trying to get him out.
Another passenger was shouting for help. Saws were cutting through metal somewhere else on the train.
His cell phone was ringing nonstop but he couldn’t move his arm to answer it. It was his wife who had been waiting for him at the train station with their three sons, ages 7, 5 and 1 month, and who was becoming increasingly certain with each unanswered call that he would never answer.
“I thought my arm was cut off,” Landis said. “There was an arm laying across my body … and I was touching the arm. So I told the firemen my arm had been severed. But I could hear the firemen talking to each other, and they said ‘No, that’s a DB.’ A dead body.”
It had landed on top of him.
The first car had indeed been the deadliest place to be. But the impact was so severe that even people in the rear car had been killed.
“I found two bodies on a staircase in the third car, one on top of the other,” Eckstein said.
Landis was one of the first to be flown by helicopter to a hospital. He was relieved when he was finally in flight, but he worried when doctors said they wanted to put him in a medically induced coma while he recovered from serious internal injuries.
He had suffered a bruised heart, bruised lungs, broken ribs, a broken back, broken arm, fractured sternum, internal bleeding and had a wrist dislocated so badly it would need surgery.
Doctors were able to keep him conscious during his recovery. After five days in intensive care, he was transferred to a regular hospital room. He took his first steps Tuesday, but he doesn’t expect to be going home anytime soon.
When Metrolink resumed service Monday, Romero returned to the train, and he and other emotional passengers hugged and wept.
He posted a note at the Simi Valley station listing fellow riders he knows only by first name and asking them to call and tell him they’re OK.
He found himself paying more attention to anyone he has a chance encounter with, not just his train friends. He’ll pause to smile and say hi, and one day last week he picked up some Mickey Mouse stickers at work and handed them out to everyone in the second car.
“Things are starting to get back into place,” he said, striking a more upbeat tone. “I don’t know if it will ever get back in place to the full extent, but it’s gett ing there.”
Buckley had told his family that when he died he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered from the back of a train.
His son doubts that it’s legal to spread the ashes from the back of the train, but his family hopes to scatter them off a bridge above the tracks.
“He died truly doing something he loved,” Buckley said of his father. “But I hope he died peacefully and not in some mangled steel. That’s a hard thought to get out of my head.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By JOHN ROGERS
Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ It was shaping up as a perfect afternoon when Kipp Landis climbed aboard the doomed Metrolink 111 train at Union Station.
Landis had managed to get away from his law office early, giving him just enough time to catch the 3:35 p.m. train to Moorpark to coach his 5-year-old son Jett’s soccer team. Along with his briefcase, he was carrying a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts for his players.
Before leaving the station, train engineer Robert Sanchez, a diabetic, phoned in his dinner order to a deli just down the street from Metrolink’s Moorpark station, the last stop on his run. He told Hub Hoagies ‘N More owner Randy Richardson he’d be there about 4:30 p.m. to pick up the roast beef sandwich — no onion, no tomato, extra light mayo and Italian dressing.
Neither Sanchez nor Landis would make it to that final stop.
Sanchez would die in the cab of his locomotive after driving through a red light and head-on into a freight train, killing 24 passengers. Landis would join many of his fellow passengers at an emergency room, fighting for his life.
The tragedy of Sept. 12 would forever alter the lives of hundreds of people, from the 222 on board to those who should have been on the train but missed it, to the relatives of riders who were killed, to the veteran first-responders who labeled it the most horrific thing they’d ever seen.
For Landis, the ride home began uneventfully with him taking his usual seat in the train’s first car.
“It was a beautiful day, it was perfect,” he recalled, describing one of those idyllic, sun-splashed Southern California afternoons seen on postcards.
A Metrolink rider for nearly 13 years, he ignored warnings of friends who called the front of the train the “suicide car.” He figured he’d be safe as long as he sat with his back to the engine so that he wouldn’t pitch forward if the train hit something. It never occurred to him that the train might run head-on into an oncoming locomotive going 40 mph.
The first 45 minutes of the ride were uneventful. Landis chatted with a young woman he worried would doze off and miss her stop.
She got off at the Chatsworth station, and about two minutes later — 4:22 p.m. — the 42-year-old attorney and Moorpark planning commissioner heard a gigantic bang.
“The next thing I remember, I was telling myself to breathe,” Landis said from his hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center last week.
Minutes after the crash, Dr. Marc Eckstein was pulling up to his San Fernando Valley home when he heard a bulletin on the radio about a train crash.
Eckstein, medical director for the Los Angeles Fire Department, put the car’s emergency lights and siren on and raced to the scene 10 minutes away. A veteran of earthquakes, deadly fires and a 2005 Metrolink train crash that killed 11 people, Eckstein was stunned by what he saw.
“I’ve been doing emergency medicine for 25 years,” since he was a teenage paramedic in New York in the 1980s, said Eckstein, 44. “I have never seen so much carnage like this in one place in my career.”
Firefighters from nearby Station 77 could see smoke rising from the freight train’s locomotive as they arrived. It was engulfed by flames and two of its crew members were trapped inside and frantically pounding on the windshield for help.
“That was a challenge, getting through that front windshield, because it’s essentially like bulletproof glass. And they got those guys out, saved their lives,” said fire Capt. Thomas Moore, 49. He said firefighters try to focus on moments like those rather than dwell on the people they couldn’t save.
Near the fire, the Metrolink’s locomotive was embedded in the first passenger car. Eckstein could see bodies of several riders ripped to pieces and intertwined with metal debris from the train. Some were stacked on top of injured passengers.
Among the dead was Alan Buckley, 59, who may have been Metrolink’s biggest fan. He was riding from his home in Simi Valley to his job as a mechanic for the city of Burbank since 1992, the year the agency inaugurated commuter rail service.
His father had been a railroad switchman and he had been fascinated with trains since he was a child. He loved trains so much that he once sent his mother a postcard of the one he rode with the words: ‘This is the train I take back and forth to work. The greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.’”
“And that’s what ended up killing him,” said his son, Jeff Buckley, his voice choked with emotion.
Like Landis, Buckley had been seated in the front car. He rode in the back on the way to work and in the front on the way home because that’s where his buddies sat.
Jerry Romero should have been in the train’s second car, but he wasn’t.
He decided at the last minute to drive to work that morning so he could pick up his new bicycle. He was at a Studio City bike shop when his frantic father called to find out if he was all right.
“Somebody made the statement to me about my being lucky, how I should be thankful, be happy,” said Romero, 43. “But what I’m wondering is when I’m going to feel that.”
Had he been on the train, he said, perhaps he could have helped some of the injured.
“It’s a hard feeling to get out of your mind,” he said.
Landis is unsure how long he was unconscious, but when he awoke he was trapped in the wreckage with a pair of firefighters standing above him, trying to get him out.
Another passenger was shouting for help. Saws were cutting through metal somewhere else on the train.
His cell phone was ringing nonstop but he couldn’t move his arm to answer it. It was his wife who had been waiting for him at the train station with their three sons, ages 7, 5 and 1 month, and who was becoming increasingly certain with each unanswered call that he would never answer.
“I thought my arm was cut off,” Landis said. “There was an arm laying across my body … and I was touching the arm. So I told the firemen my arm had been severed. But I could hear the firemen talking to each other, and they said ‘No, that’s a DB.’ A dead body.”
It had landed on top of him.
The first car had indeed been the deadliest place to be. But the impact was so severe that even people in the rear car had been killed.
“I found two bodies on a staircase in the third car, one on top of the other,” Eckstein said.
Landis was one of the first to be flown by helicopter to a hospital. He was relieved when he was finally in flight, but he worried when doctors said they wanted to put him in a medically induced coma while he recovered from serious internal injuries.
He had suffered a bruised heart, bruised lungs, broken ribs, a broken back, broken arm, fractured sternum, internal bleeding and had a wrist dislocated so badly it would need surgery.
Doctors were able to keep him conscious during his recovery. After five days in intensive care, he was transferred to a regular hospital room. He took his first steps Tuesday, but he doesn’t expect to be going home anytime soon.
When Metrolink resumed service Monday, Romero returned to the train, and he and other emotional passengers hugged and wept.
He posted a note at the Simi Valley station listing fellow riders he knows only by first name and asking them to call and tell him they’re OK.
He found himself paying more attention to anyone he has a chance encounter with, not just his train friends. He’ll pause to smile and say hi, and one day last week he picked up some Mickey Mouse stickers at work and handed them out to everyone in the second car.
“Things are starting to get back into place,” he said, striking a more upbeat tone. “I don’t know if it will ever get back in place to the full extent, but it’s gett ing there.”
Buckley had told his family that when he died he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered from the back of a train.
His son doubts that it’s legal to spread the ashes from the back of the train, but his family hopes to scatter them off a bridge above the tracks.
“He died truly doing something he loved,” Buckley said of his father. “But I hope he died peacefully and not in some mangled steel. That’s a hard thought to get out of my head.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.