Suicide By Train Popular In Florida

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Suicide By Train: An act of horror, with many victims

One afternoon Derrick Edwards was sitting outside his apartment, soaking his tender ankle in a bucket of water and Epsom salts, when without a word to anyone he put his right shoe back on and walked a block east to meet the train.

As engine 504 rumbled north through Riviera Beach at 38 miles an hour, engineer Gary Gilsinan and brakeman Chris Hall of the Florida East Coast Railway saw what was about to happen. But there was nothing they could do.

As the train drew near, Edwards lay down across the tracks, crossed his arms, and looked toward heaven. Then the freight train cut him in half.

Those who choose to step into the path of a train account for a relatively small number of the average 2,300 Floridians who commit suicide each year. But dying beneath the wheels of a 200-ton locomotive suggests a particular horror. It is an act that is unimaginably gruesome, public, and involves unwilling accomplices.

"It's rather a helpless feeling, to sit up there and watch it," said Hall, who needed several hundred yards to stop engine 504 after it struck Edwards.

More train-pedestrian fatalities take place in Palm Beach and Broward counties than anywhere else in Florida. Since January 2001, more than 30 percent of all the state's "trespasser deaths," as they are labeled by the Federal Railroad Administration, have occurred in the two counties.

This year, seven pedestrians have been killed by trains in Palm Beach and Broward counties. Most were ruled suicides by county medical examiners.

Any suicide leaves many victims. In the wake of each death are family members and friends haunted by thoughts of what they might have done to head off the act. But suicide by train is unusual because it also involves others -- the train's crew.

"You never prepare for it," said Gilsinan, 36, of Port St. Lucie. "But everybody's going to experience some trauma, and when you do, you just have to move on."

Not Taken Seriously

Edwards, 46, well-known on the streets of his hometown for his eccentric ways and his nickname, Dirt, had talked of ending his life for so many years that no one took him seriously.

"I'm still shocked," said longtime friend Edward Hollis, who often gave Edwards a lift to a clinic where he received medication for depression.

In South Florida, a populous coastal corridor dissected by two major rail lines that pass several hundred street crossings, freight and passenger trains are vital to commerce and transportation. Many residents who live near the tracks view trains as a noisy nuisance. For motorists they are often a curse.

But for the troubled, trains can seem a sure-fire way out.

In February, three Broward County men were struck and killed by trains in as many days. Two of the deaths, on the FEC tracks in Oakland Park and in Dania Beach, were ruled suicides by the county's medical examiner. The death of the third victim, a 49-year-old one-legged man hit while trying to get across the tracks in Deerfield Beach, was classified an accident.

Since Edwards was killed in May, three other Palm Beach County residents have chosen to die the same way. The latest took place July 21 in Boca Raton when Rose Marie Diaco, 53, parked her car in the 1700 block of South Dixie Highway, walked over to the FEC tracks, and lay down between the rails, according to Boca Raton police. A northbound freight pulling 68 hoppers loaded with rock struck her about 10 p.m.

On June 30, 10 blocks north of where Diaco died, Michael Kinkel ran out from behind the restored 1930 railway station on South Dixie Highway and laid his head on the rail as another FEC freight approached from the south.

Kinkel, 20, was in a drug rehabilitation program and lived two blocks west of the tracks.

"He was a beautiful child, so gifted," said his heartbroken father, Richard Kinkel, of Coltsneck, N.J. "I can't understand why this happened."

Tammie Garrison, 38, a West Palm Beach woman, also died on the FEC tracks. Fighting problems with alcohol and homelessness, Garrison ignored warnings from onlookers and marched down the rails into an oncoming southbound freight June 8 in the city's Fernwood neighborhood, witnesses told police.

"She was like my baby; losing her was like losing a child," said Garrison's sister, Perinda Hinton.

Other Means Available

Suicide experts struggle to explain why a person bent on self-destruction chooses a train over other available means. To the rational mind, said Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, "It is hard not to think that people have to screw up their courage, or numb their brains, to die in such a traumatic way."

But suicidal people, under the influence of drugs, alcohol or psychosis, are not rational, Berman said. Often, he said, people who commit public suicides engage in what Berman called "magical thinking, they imagine getting publicity and being dead at the same time."

CSX railroad spokesman Gary Sease said using trains to commit suicide "makes us angry. It makes us a party to an individual's death, and that's not right."

"It is very traumatic for the people in the cab," Sease said.

Many railroads offer immediate time off and counseling for employees involved in the suicides of others.

"There is not a locomotive engineer alive who does not recall every fatal incident they are ever involved in," said John Tolman, legislative director for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, who witnessed deadly collisions during his days as an engine fireman. "You are the last one to see that person alive. It's a heavy burden."

Still, trainmen often shun offers of counseling, according to railroad officials.

"Many shrug it off," said Joe McMahon, a public safety official with the Jacksonville-based railway CSX.

"They have to know it's not their fault."

Freight trains often travel at more than 50 mph. Amtrak passenger trains reach speeds in the 70s.

With close calls between trains and motorists or trespassers routine, train crews know that fatal accidents are inevitable.

"It is something that engineers over a period of time come to accept," said Husein Cumber, south Florida spokesman for FEC, based in St. Augustine. "They see what's about to happen, and know they don't have ability to prevent it."

Hall, the brakeman on engine 504, said he is coping with Edwards' death by acknowledging his inability to prevent it.

"He made a clear choice, and there was nothing anyone could have done at the time," said Hall, 45, a onetime oil field worker who lives in Fort Pierce.

Railroad officials say there is no way to prevent a suicidal person from access to the tracks.

There is little way to prevent the nightmarish legacy that every such death leaves.

"I live in an apartment right by the tracks, and I think of Michael every time I hear the train go by," said Michael Frommeyer, 50, a former social worker from Baltimore who often sat beside Kinkel on the bus as they rode to group therapy sessions in Boca Raton.

"All I can think of is what pain the guy must have been in to make a decision like that."