LOS ANGELES — A commuter train engineer who ran a stop signal was blamed Saturday for the nation’s deadliest rail disaster in 15 years, a wreck that killed 25 people and left such a mass of smoldering, twisted metal that it took nearly a day to recover all the bodies.
A preliminary investigation found “it was a Metrolink engineer that failed to stop at a red signal, and that was the probable cause” of the collision Friday with a freight train in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, said Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell.
She said she thinks the engineer, whose name was not released, is dead.
“When two trains are in the same place at the same time, somebody’s made a terrible mistake,” said Tyrrell, who was shaking and near tears as she spoke with reporters.
Authorities later announced that the effort to recover bodies from the Metrolink train’s crushed front car had ended, with the death toll at 24. It rose to 25 when USC Medical Center spokeswoman Adelaide DeLaCerda said a 50-year- old man transported to the hospital died Saturday.
A total of 135 people were injured, with 81 taken to hospitals in serious or critical condition. There was no overall condition update available Saturday, but a telephone survey of five hospitals found nine of 34 patients still critical.
Firefighter Searcy Jackson III, a 20-year veteran and one of the first to pull bodies from the wreckage, said he had never seen such devastation. The 50-year-old said his team pulled one living passenger from the train and cut the mangled metal to remove about a half-dozen bodies.
“The metal was pushed together like an accordion,” Jackson said.
Firefighters who extricated the dead were rotated in and out of the scene to prevent emotional exhaustion, said fire Capt. Armando Hogan.
“There are some things we are trained for; there are some things I don’t care what kind of training you have, you don’t always prepare for,” Hogan said. “This situation, particularly early on, with people inside the train, with the injuries, and with people moaning and crying and screaming, it was a traumatic experience.”
Police set up what they called a unification center at a local high school to try to connect worried people with information about friends or relatives who they thought were aboard the train.
The family of Jacob Hefter, 18, waited there for news. On Saturday afternoon, after a night looking for information, his family learned that his body had been identified at the scene of the crash.
Hefter’s girlfriend had gotten a text message from him Friday saying his commuter train had left a San Fernando Valley station and he would soon be at his destination in Moorpark. They might have been his last words.
The collision happened three minutes later.
“It was not the news we wanted to hear,” said elder brother Jared Hefter. “But at least it’s news.”
Jared said his brother, a student at California State University-Long Beach, had apparently been sitting in the second car. Emergency personnel identified him using a family photograph.
The collision occurred on a horseshoe-shaped section of track in Chatsworth at the west end of the San Fernando Valley, near a 500-foot-long tunnel underneath Stoney Point Park. There is a siding at one end of the tunnel where one train can wait for another to pass, Tyrrell said.
“Even if the train is on the main track, it must go through a series of signals, and each one of the signals must be obeyed,” Tyrrell said. “What we believe happened, barring any new information from the NTSB, is we believe that our engineer failed to stop . . . and that was the cause of the accident.”
Tyrrell said Metrolink determined the cause by reviewing dispatch records and computers.
National Transportation Safety Board member Kitty Higgins said her agency is waiting to complete its investigation before making any statements about the cause of the accident.
By late Saturday morning, the Metrolink engine had been pulled out of the mangled passenger car, which was raised by a crane and surrounded by tarps. Bulldozers pulled away chunks of metal.
“It’s the worst feeling in the world because you know what you’re going to find,” said fire Capt. Alex Arriola, who had crawled into the bottom of the smashed passenger car. “You have to put aside the fact that it’s someone’s husband, daughter or friend.”
Families of eight of the dead had been notified and two women who were pronounced dead at hospitals were unidentified, coroner’s Assistant Chief Ed Winter said. Authorities released the names of 20 of the victims Saturday.
