Death Obliges Young Man Who Courted It

Kevin McGeough heard his last song as he saw his last light.

The song was by a group called Slayer. The light was on a 72-car Southern Pacific freight train.

The light bore down on him, knifing through the weed-choked Simi Valley field. He was clutching his tape player. The four or five other young men clustered on the tracks jumped to the right. McGeough froze.

“I yelled, ‘Kevin, jump!’ ” said McGeough’s friend, Christopher Frageorgia, 21, an on-again, off-again construction worker. “He was just too drunk. He didn’t move. He just didn’t know what was going on.”

If McGeough, 18, meant to look death in the face and flee at the last possible instant--a pastime of some of the young men who convene in this Simi Valley field--he wasn’t quick enough. As he jumped toward Frageorgia, the train clipped him, fracturing and dislocating his skull.

Since McGeough’s final moment came and went Tuesday night, Frageorgia has replayed it a million times.

“His vision wasn’t very good,” he said. “He just stood there and looked at the train. He was always squinting. Everyone else jumped, and he just was paralyzed. He was the one always telling people playing ‘chicken’ to knock it off. He was the mellowest of everyone. He didn’t even do graffiti.”

Separated by a few cement stanchions and a torn-down fence from a blue-collar subdivision, the privately owned field off Alviso Street is a daytime hangout for neighborhood children. At night, though, it is a haven for a handful of detached young adults, passing through from nowhere to nowhere else.

Four mounds of trash mark their “forts”--subterranean shelters where they bed down from time to time. The burrows are covered with scrap lumber and furnished with castoff couches and old mattresses. Patio chairs are planted amid the broken glass and empty cereal boxes, junked appliances and defunct car parts.

The squalor might seem more symptomatic of the inner city than the suburbs, but many of the hangers-on in the field are neighborhood people unwelcome in their own homes.

One night last week, a 24-year-old man who called himself Richard came by, looking for cigarettes, conversation, a few dollars and a place to stay.

He had a box of dehydrated chicken soup in the pocket of his Army fatigue jacket. His parents had thrown him out for “raising hell and drinking.” If nothing better came along, he was planning to sleep in his parents’ driveway that night.

Frageorgia has weathered some rough times of his own. After his release from jail on a joy-riding charge, he couldn’t afford rent and wanted to be near his girlfriend, who lives in the neighborhood, so he built himself a subterranean shelter.

“I stayed there about three weeks,” he said. “I built a fireplace out of an old water heater and threw a mattress and some chairs in there. People would come over, but I wouldn’t let any minors in.”

The shelter burned during a “barbecue,” he said.

Residents Vexed

Neighbors are irate about the goings-on in the field.

Pointing to the graffiti-covered cement blocks at the field’s entrance, Fred Schlegel vowed to take a stand against the neighborhood’s decay. “I’m going down to the hardware store to get paints and brushes, and I’m going to make all these kids paint over this stuff.

“The place is a junkyard,” he said. “It’s a hazard. I won’t let my kids play out there. All this has got to stop. If the cops won’t stop it, then I will.”

Police have rousted transients from the area occasionally, Capt. Richard Wright said. He said that Southern Pacific engineers have complained of rocks hurled their way and that the field has long been a spot for underage drinking.

But, he said, he knew of no more-serious complaints than that being lodged.

Bob Perrault, assistant to the Simi Valley city manager, said he was not aware that neighbors were upset. “This is the first it’s been brought to our attention,” he said. “To the best of my knowledge, the city has not been contacted by neighbors and residents expressing those kind of concerns.”

One neighbor, who asked not to be identified, complained that city officials’ response has been lax. “I ask the Fire Department what we can do about the fires out there, and they say, ‘Talk to the city,’ and the city does nothing.

“I’d like to see it cleaned up for good, but I don’t think it will happen. I don’t think that kid’s death will mean anything to the city or the railroad or anyone else.”

Real estate broker Barbara McGeough of Moorpark, Kevin’s mother, said her son was the only one of her four children still living at home.

He had dropped out of Conejo High School in 1986. “He never said why he didn’t want to finish,” she said. “Basically, he had just lost all interest in school.”

Last month he was laid off from a construction job, she said.

He was thinking about getting his high school equivalency diploma and going on to college, she said. Meanwhile, he would visit friends, occasionally spending nights away from home, she said.

“I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” she said. “Kevin’s death was so senseless.”

Times staff writer Deborrah Wilkinson contributed to this story.