Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Cops couldn’t identify man killed by train
Then a silky terrier/Jack Russell mix led them to heartbroken family
HOLLYWOOD — Roku is depressed. He hasn’t been himself, his family says. He keeps looking longingly toward the front door.
When he steps outdoors, the little silky terrier/Jack Russell mix is intent on leading the family back to the railroad crossing at South Dixie Highway and Harrison Street — the site where unbearable tragedy struck the Lopez family at nearly 80 miles an hour.
Two Mondays ago, on Aug. 12, David Lopez took Roku, his mother’s service dog, for a walk — like he did twice a day, every day.
Lopez, 31, never returned to his
Hollywood home. But Roku did, trailing his leash behind him, tailed by two Hollywood police officers.
Lopez had been hit by a Virgin Trains USA/Brightline train while crossing the tracks. His body was flung 15 feet. He died at the scene and had no ID with him.
Mirtha Lopez was home about a block away on Van Buren Street gathering papers for a doctor’s appointment when she heard and recognized Roku’s bark.
“I didn’t pay attention,” she said, until about 15 minutes later when she heard the barking again, louder and more forceful.
When Mirtha Lopez looked outside and spotted Roku downstairs with two cops, she didn’t understand.
Why is Roku with police? Did he bite someone? Where’s my son? Where’s David? Where’s David?
“He came up looking desperate to get me,” Mirtha Lopez said of Roku. “He brought them to me. He led them to the family.”
His full name is actually Hercules Roku and he’ll be 3 later this month. Everyone calls him Roku, except for David Lopez. To him, the little service dog was “My Hercules.”
David Lopez lived with his mother and father in a small second-floor apartment and was dedicated to helping them, his oldest brother Mario Lopez said.
He was unemployed at the time but usually held retail or restaurant jobs, was family oriented, jovial and believed in the power of prayer, his brother said.
“He was happy. He always, for everyone in our family, for everyone, he always had a smile,” said Mario Lopez, 43, of Sunny Isles.
David Lopez is one of nearly 20 people killed by the high-speed commuter train, formerly known as Brightline and recently rebranded as Virgin Trains USA, since test runs began in July 2017. Two of the deaths were in 2017. Eight were in 2018. And so far in 2019, there’s been nearly one a month.
In the weeks since Lopez’s death, word circulating around the neighborhood was that Roku got spooked by the train, got loose, bolted and Lopez went after him — right into the path of the southbound train.
That theory is “all assumption,” brother Mario Lopez said.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense, that he would go after the dog,” he said.
A witness told police David Lopez ducked under the railroad crossing arm with a dog on a leash and started across the tracks as if he didn’t hear or sense a thing.
But Roku sensed the approaching train and bolted, that witness, Tristan McNeil, 33, of Pembroke Pines, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“The dog knew that the train was coming,” McNeil said. “He didn’t want to get hit, so he was gone; he ran away.”
Lopez had no time to react or run , McNeil said. “By the time the dog ran off, I would say in three seconds the train just hit him.”
The Hollywood police incident report doesn’t include those details.
It simply says McNeil saw David Lopez walking slowly with a dog on a leash, the train’s loud horn blared multiple times and “moments later McNeil observed [Lopez] get struck by the moving train and go airborne.”
There’s dispute in the neighborhood about whether the train sounded its horn.
Since May, quiet zones have been in effect at railroad crossings between Miami and West Palm Beach making it so engineers no longer have to blast their horns as a warning at every crossing.
Train engineers still have the option of sounding their horns when they perceive an emergency on the tracks, such as a vehicle or pedestrian.
Supplemental safety measures such as crossing gate arms, upgraded warning devices, improved lighting, new signs, medians and curbs have been installed to hopefully discourage pedestrian, cyclists and motorists.
According to a police report, the engineer driving when Lopez was hit said she began honking the horn and tried to stop the train as soon as she spotted him on the tracks.
“For anyone else to die like that, it’s such a senseless thing to go walk your dog and not come back — it’s just not right,” Mario Lopez said. “The idea that they’re flying through and not slowing down, it’s a public hazard.”
Mirtha Lopez had four sons just two years ago. Now she has two.
Her youngest, Anthony, was 25 when he died from a medication complication that put him into cardiac arrest. He died in hospice two months later. That was two years ago.
Now David. Her second youngest, just 31.
The family was just beginning to come out of the hole of grief and loss the death of their baby brother plunged them into, Mario Lopez said.
Things were just starting to look and feel positive again, he said.
That’s why this is such a tragedy, Mirtha Lopez said.
“Unbearable,” Mario Lopez said.
Anthony Lopez’s cremated remains were buried with David Lopez’s body on Monday, Aug. 19 at Vista Memorial Gardens in Miami Lakes.
“I had to bury them, put them to rest together,” Mirtha Lopez said. “I thought I was going to go first and they were going to bury me.”
David Lopez was big on family, especially adored his 8-month-old nephew and 23-year-old niece, took special pleasure in eating and was very candid, bluntly so.
“In an honest way, never any malice,” Mario Lopez said.
Pizza, pasta and cafecito made him happy, as did beach barbecues with the fam.
He prayed and read the Bible daily and basketball was his favorite sport to play and watch. When it was time to root for a team, it was always the Knicks, Mario Lopez said.
Their father, Mario Lopez Sr., was too distraught to speak about his son. Instead, the retired jeweler who raised his boys in Queens, N.Y. and relocated with them to South Florida about five years ago, wrote out his thoughts on a piece of lined paper.
“[David] in life was a noble and loving heart; a trusted soul,” he wrote.
His son left home not knowing “he was never to come back to see his family” and “met his destiny in a horrible way,” Mario Lopez Sr. wrote.
David Lopez was jovial and drawn to people, so when he walked Roku he liked to head toward downtown Hollywood and Young Circle, Mario Lopez said.
And everybody along that route knew him and Roku. If not by name, surely by sight.
Around the corner from David Lopez’s apartment, and across the street from where he was killed, at Food Max, the morning and afternoon clerks knew him as a regular.
He seemed like a nice guy, didn’t say much, always had his little dog with him and his daily purchase was a thin, single-wrapped Black & Mild cigar.
“He came every day to buy that cigar,” one of the clerk’s said.
Across the street at Miami Tattoo Supplies, Daniel Rod also remembered Lopez fondly.
“I know the guy,” Rod said. “I see him every day walking with his dog. I greet him.”
Their exchanges usually went like this, Rod said.
“Hi, how’s it going, man? How’s life going?”
Lopez’s usual answer: “It’s good, man.”
Rod said he remembers the commotion when the train ran over someone but was too busy with customers to check it out.
He was saddened to later learn the victim was the friendly guy who strolled by with his little dog, pretty much every day.
“He was a really cool guy. I’m just sad to see him go, and at such a young age,” Rod said.
Rod said he later encountered Lopez’s hysterical mother near the spot where her son’s body had landed. Offerings of tall votive prayer candles had accumulated there.
“She was right there putting the candles down, a little memorial for him,” Rod said. “To me, when I seen her it looked like her eyes were going to come out of her sockets for all the tears.”
When police finally allowed Mirtha Lopez to leave her apartment after an hour, after her son’s body had been removed, she went straight to the scene where he drew his last breath.
“I saw his blood,” she said. “I put a rock there, so I could remember his spot.”
Roku remembers the spot too.
“He wants to take us over there,” Mirtha Lopez said. “He keeps going over there.”