Life ends as yet another ‘trespasser incident’ on Brightline tracks

The impact was imperceptible to passengers aboard the Brightline, the Friday evening we killed Melissa Ann Lavell.

No thump. The train just came to an abrupt stop, though not so abrupt that I couldn’t rescue my tumbler of whiskey as it slid across the table. Those of us in the passenger cars had no idea we had been party to the last awful tragedy in a life beset with pathos.

I had taken the 6:55 p.m. train, Fort Lauderdale to West Palm Beach, a PR junket introducing the new service. It was Jan. 12, the day before Brightline opened the passenger service to paying customers.

Until we hit a forlorn stretch through northeast Boynton Beach, it had been a dream trip compared to my other experiences with American mass transit. High tech. Comfy leather seats. WiFi. USB. Electrical outlets. A rolling bar. And a train so quiet that the speed of the thing — Lauderdale to West Palm in 40 fleeting minutes — was deceptive.

Maybe Melissa Lavell, too, had misjudged our velocity when she ignored flashing lights, lowered barricade arms and blundered onto the tracks at Northeast Sixth Avenue.

So much for Brightline’s PR excursion. Eventually, we were herded off the train and onto a bus with only a cursory explanation: the trip had been interrupted by a “trespasser incident,” which seemed a cruel euphemism for what we later learned had been a grisly pedestrian death. (“Trespasser incident” is the antiseptic term American railroads employ as shorthand for train-related pedestrian fatalities and injuries.)

They’re epidemic, “trespasser incidents.” Worldwide, nationwide, statewide, and along the two sets of commuter tracks that traverse South Florida. Often, the victims are suicides.

In South Florida’s three biggest counties, 26 people died on railroads last year, up from 14 the previous year. Last month, the Sun Sentinel’s Lisa Huriash reported that so many of those deaths were suspected suicides that the Tri-Rail passenger service has initiated an anti-suicide program, including plans to use drones to scout the tracks for potential suicides.

Melissa Lavell’s was the third death on the Brightline tracks since the passenger service began test runs last summer. On July, 24, an 18-year-old woman’s death on the Brightline tracks in Boca Raton was attributed to suicide. On Nov. 1, a 35-year-old homeless woman was killed on the tracks in Deerfield Beach.

On Wednesday afternoon, five days after Lavell’s death, there was a fourth Brightline fatality. Jeffrey D. King, 51, had pedaled his bicycle across yet another Boynton Beach crossing. “I just don’t know,” a witness told the Palm Beach Post. “The crossings were down and everything. The lights were up.”

The four deaths ignited the inevitable political reaction. A Boynton Beach city commissioner demanded that Brightline cease operations. Florida Sen. Bill Nelson asked U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to investigate. And the fatalities reinvigorated long-simmering opposition to Brightline along the Treasure Coast. Of course, when Brightline opponents complain about train fatalities, they ignore the mayhem along South Florida’s main north-south transportation alternative. Our infamously insane stretch of I-95 ranks as one of the deadliest roadways in America.

But pedestrian railway deaths are indeed a national problem. The Chicago Tribune reported that the U.S. suffers about 800 trespass deaths a year. Some 30 percent of those fatalities — more than 50 percent in urban areas — are attributed to suicide.

So many suicides have plagued commuter rail operations that transit systems in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York and Toronto have launched anti-suicide campaigns. Amtrak has posted over 100 signs with the national suicide prevention hotline — 1-800-273-8255.

Brightline countered critics this week by noting safety and engineering upgrades along the rail corridor and the company’s safety awareness efforts. An anti-suicide campaign might clash with the sunny Brightline ambience, but it might help keep the critics at bay.

No one knows why Lavell ventured across the tracks. Boynton Beach police assumed she was just trying to beat the train, though her life, these last few years, had borne more despair than a Russian novel.

The 32-year-old native of Sewell, New Jersey, had an arrest record in Broward and Palm Beach counties dating back to 2011. Mostly low-rent crimes associated with drug abuse. She spent a year in the Broward County Jail.

Her last few months devolved into more horrors. On March 21, the body of her 34-year-old sister Linda Lavell, mother of three, was discovered in a sleazy Boynton Beach motel, a drug overdose. Two weeks later, Melissa’s brother-in-law, Matthew Stoelker (Linda’s husband), just out from a 60-day stint in the Palm Beach County jail, suffered a fatal drug overdose.

In August, an armed robber intercepted Melissa just after midnight in a sketchy Boynton Beach neighborhood. He shot her in the leg and shoulder and smashed her in the face with his gun. She was hospitalized in critical condition.

Finally, on Jan. 12, as I sipped my whiskey in luxurious environs, star-crossed Melissa Lavell encountered a fast train coming.

Fred Grimm