A University City man stepped onto the train tracks in Rose Canyon last Friday morning just before a speeding Coaster came through and instantly killed him. The morning train schedule was delayed for several hours.
“It was the perfect storm for us,” said Sara Benson, North County Transit District (NCTD) marketing director. “It did affect our train schedule because it shut down our tracks for three hours.”
The 46-year-old man allegedly stepped from behind a nearby shack and walked onto wooden tracks south of Regents Road just before the first Coaster came bulleting toward him, according to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. The train, filled with 400 to 500 passengers, was traveling around 80 miles per hour, and the engineer couldn’t stop in time, the sheriff’s department said.
Benson said the Coaster usually runs about seven trains on a normal morning, but the transit district cancelled three while the Medical Examiner’s Office conducted its investigation and Hazmat cleaned the site. At about 9:30 a.m., the trains were running on their normal schedule, Benson said.
University City resident John Wolfe said he heard the Coaster’s brakes at about 6 a.m. from his home that overlooks Rose Canyon.
“It is so sad,” Wolfe said. “I heard the train screech to a stop, and then a couple of hours later I saw them all out there. And they had a person covered up with a yellow tarp.”
According to an investigator with the Medical Examiner’s Office, the man’s time of death was 5:55 a.m. He reportedly lived just blocks away from Rose Canyon and the site of the tracks.
Witnesses said he waited until the train approached. The engineer pulled the brakes but couldn’t stop in time.
“It’s a part of life when you’re a train engineer,” Benson said.
NCTD contracts its engineers, who are immediately replaced when a fatality occurs.
“This is an especially bad time of year,” Benson said. “Especially when the economy is down, we have more [suicides].”
Preliminary results led investigators to believe this was an act of suicide, the investigator said.
The man left a wife and a daughter, the investigator said.