Amtrak crash: ‘It was chaos’
Passengers recount accident in South Carolina that left two dead and 110 injured.
CAYCE, S.C. — Passengers aboard the Amtrak train that slammed into a freight train before dawn Sunday described being jolted from slumber as seats ripped away, awakening to screams and crying.
“It was shaking, then it started jumping,” passenger Eric Larkin said.
He said he was suddenly awakened as he felt the train leave the tracks as it hit a curve. His seat then broke loose, slamming him into the row of seats in front of him.
It was in the panic that followed, Larkin said, that he heard screams and crying all around him as passengers sought to leave the crumpled train. Other passengers were bleeding, he said, and his right knee throbbed from where it banged into the seats in front of him.
Two people were killed and more than 110 injured, authorities said.
Walking with a limp hours later, Larkin said he was dazed and didn’t even know where he was when the train finally came to a stop.
Soon after he got off the train, Larkin said, arriving police officers told him to stop taking cellphone photos of the wreckage and not to share any of the images.
Eventually he was shuttled to a middle school with other passengers.
“It’s a blessing to be alive,” Larkin said. “I thought that I was dead.”
It was the third deadly wreck involving Amtrak in less than two months. The Silver Star was en route from New York to Miami with nearly 150 people aboard when it struck the empty CSX train about 2:45 a.m., authorities said.
The crash happened near a switchyard south of Columbia, S.C., where rail cars hauling automobiles are loaded and unloaded.
Many of the passengers were asleep.
Andre Neblett, who played with the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, said his 43year-old mother, Tronia Dorsey, was on board. He said she described massive jolts.
“It was chaos,” Neblett said, describing what his mother told him as he left an American Red Cross shelter where his mother’s purple suitcase had been sent.
In the third rail car, a seat had fallen onto Dorsey’s legs, her son said. He added that she described “a lot of screaming” and babies crying in the dark rail compartment.
Some passengers called their loved ones in the minutes afterward.
The State newspaper reports that Ryan Roberts couldn’t believe it when his wife, Alexandria Delgado, awoke him with a call early Sunday to their Raleigh, N.C., home. He said he asked her to repeat herself three times when she said her train had derailed.