Arnie Peterson's evening train, the Metrolink 111, banked to the left, toward the coast. The work week, and the metropolis, faded behind him.
He and his fellow travelers were a motley crew -- a lawyer with tasseled loafers; a young man with a shaved head and a profanity emblazoned on his shirt; Peterson, a 47-year-old cement worker for the city of Burbank, clad in his orange work shirt, headed home to Simi Valley after another long day. Normally, they would probably never be in the same room, but 10 times a week -- once in the morning, once in the evening, five days a week -- they were together.
Theirs was "an odd kinship. Many of them had communicated for years with little more than nods, and yet they were so respectful that they wouldn't think of stealing each other's favorite seats, so trusting that when they had to use the restroom, they would leave cell phones and briefcases on their seats without second thought.
Peterson was staring out the window, "thinking," he said, "about how it was Friday."
The terror, for some, began before impact. The left turn in the tracks, just above the Northridge-Chatsworth station, is very sharp. So commuters sitting by the windows on the left side could see the Union Pacific freight train headed straight for them.
"My first thought was: I'm not seeing this," said Albert Cox, 53, a regular rider who had boarded the train in Burbank and was on his way home to Simi Valley.
It was clear they could not stop soon enough. There was time for a few muffled screams before they hit.
Arnie Peterson found himself flying through the air, over six rows of seats. He is not, he pointed out, a small man.
Everything and everyone, for a moment, seemed airborne. Some of the tables, torn from their moorings, turned into missiles, hurtling toward the front of the train. Cox was thrown from his seat -- there were no seatbelts, since Metrolink trains are not designed for sudden stops -- and landed on a table, breaking it in two. "The table won," he said. Peterson was thrown, with 20 others, against one wall of the train.
Suddenly, but for black oil seeping from the freight train and black smoke billowing from the impact site, everything stopped moving.
"It was dead quiet," Peterson said.
Slowly, the sound built again -- moaning, then screaming. Phil Thiele, 55, of Simi Valley, had been sitting in the back of a Metrolink car. Now he looked up into the face of a man who was pinned between collapsed seats.
"He was pleading with me to help him," Thiele said. "I tried my damnedest to get him out, but I just couldn't."
Nearby, a woman with a serious head injury was trying to crawl through the wreckage. Thiele had received first-aid training this week at work; he urged the woman to stay put, and placed her purse under her head as a pillow.
Across the train car, through the darkness, a scream: the fire was spreading. Thiele turned back to the pinned man. "Don't worry," he told him. "I'll stay with you as long as I can."
Soon, the first firefighter peered inside. Help was heading toward the wreckage from every direction now, through the back of a residential cul-de-sac, running down bridle paths used by local families that board horses. The riders who could move on their own were clawing their way to safety.
"People were climbing out of the side, bleeding, crying, screaming," said Katharina Feldman, who was working out of her nearby home office and raced to the scene with bottles of water after calling 911.
Firefighters assigned her to a man whose head was gashed. The man asked her to call his wife; she did, while holding his IV.
Around them, the wounded came spilling out like ants in a rainstorm. Feldman spoke with a dazed woman in her 70s; she had broken her teeth and was having chest pains. Arnie Peterson was sitting on the ground, leaning against a fence. He had blood caked on his left arm; he wasn't sure, he said, if it was his or someone else's. One woman was carried out, her femur clearly snapped in two.
The injured were laid out in a triage area near the school. Those with moderate injuries were led to a large green tarp; those with serious injuries were led to a yellow tarp; those in the worst shape were laid out on a red tarp.
Some victims had their whole heads wrapped in gauze. One man was sitting on a lawn chair; a Barack Obama button was still affixed to his white T-shirt, though it was drenched in blood. Helicopters used a nearby soccer field where children were practicing an hour earlier.
Long after the sun set, family members pressed against police cordons, desperate for information.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Special Message for Victims of Chatsworth Metrolink Disaster
On September 12, 2008, an unprecedented tragedy occurred in Chatsworth, California when Metrolink Train #111 struck a Union Pacific freight train which was traveling on the same tracks. Our hearts go out to the victims. But this tragedy should not have happened. It happened because of human error on the part of Metrolink employees. Unfortunately, as the lawyers of RKA know well, human error by railroad engineers is not at all unique as a cause of commuter rail disasters.
Jerome L. Ringler has greater experience in representing victims of commuter rail and fright train disasters than any other lawyer in the State of California, if not the country. He has served as lead counsel in every one of the largest commuter rail disasters which have occurred in Southern California in the past 10 years.
In the Placentia Commuter Rail Disaster of 2003, Mr. Ringler was appointed by the Court as lead counsel for all of the Plaintiffs. He was requested by all of the lawyers representing individuals injured or killed in that incident to try the first case. That case resulted in the largest verdict for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ever rendered by a jury in the United States. That verdict, which was for $9 million, is detailed below in the multimedia section.
In the Burbank Commuter Rail Disaster, which also occurred in 2003, Mr. Ringler was again appointed by the Court to serve as lead counsel. In that capacity he was given the responsibility to try the entire liability (i.e., fault) case for all of the victims. In other words, every one of the dozens of lawyers who represented individual victims in that disaster trusted Mr. Ringler to try the liability phase for them, knowing that their clients would only recover if Mr. Ringler was successful. He was. In fact, Mr. Ringler not only obtained a favorable verdict for all of the plaintiffs, he obtained a $12 million verdict for his own client as well. This verdict was the largest in the State of California for a person with the type of injuries Mr. Ringler's client had suffered. This verdict is detailed below in the multimedia section.
Mr. Ringler is currently lead counsel for all plaintiffs in the Glendale Metrolink Derailment Disaster of 2005. This incident was, before September 12, 2008, the largest Metrolink disaster in history. Interestingly, in that case (which involves 11 deaths and dozens of serious injuries), Mr. Ringler has, against all odds, developed testimony proving that, even though a mentally-ill person placed a jeep across the tracks that the Metrolink train was traveling upon, human error on the part of the Metrolink engineer prevented him from stopping the train before hitting the jeep, which caused the train to derail. In other words, while the jeep certainly never should have been on the tracks, the Metrolink engineer would have been able to stop the train before ever striking the jeep had he only been paying proper attention. That case is scheduled to go to trial on June 8, 2009, with Mr. Ringler as lead counsel.
The verdicts detailed on this page all relate to railroad litigation. However, Mr. Ringler has achieved enormous, record-breaking monetary awards across California in a variety of complex areas. Those accomplishments are detailed elsewhere in this website. To see them, click here.
If you or a loved one has suffered injury or death as a result of the horrific Chatsworth Metrolink Disaster, we are available to discuss your rights with you confidentially and at no charge.
Please feel free to contact us at your convenience. Ask for Mr. Ringler,or any of his partners, at (213) 473-1900.
Lawyer News RSS
