Train’s Victim Killed Himself, Authorities Say

A man who was killed by a speeding Amtrak passenger train in Ventura late Thursday was a 33-year-old psychiatric patient who purposely ran from his nearby halfway house into the train’s path, investigators said Friday.

Raul Michael Gutierrez, a manic-depressive his entire adult life, “literally ran down Laurel Street to catch the train,” coroner’s investigator James G. Wingate said. Laurel Street dead-ends at the train tracks.

Investigators said four witnesses, including three Amtrak employees, saw Gutierrez run onto the tracks, then stop.

“He paused a moment, dipped his shoulder and looked like he was throwing a football block into the train,” said a coroner’s report. It said his cause of death was “multiple traumatic injuries.”

Gutierrez, a longtime resident of the Santa Clara Manor halfway house, was calm shortly before his death, said a staff member who requested anonymity.

“About 6 o’clock we were talking to him in front of the office and we didn’t notice anything,” she said. “He was not upset. He was very calm . . . That’s why we were surprised when we were called last night.”

Police said the man was struck and killed shortly after 6 p.m. Thursday.

Gutierrez’s mother, Ellie Pope of Ojai, said she sensed that her son was in a low period Thursday.

“I had just talked to him,” she said. “We had a date to go out and eat sushi.” Her son begged off, and Pope said she asked him why.

“He said he hadn’t been feeling very well. He had his ups and downs, being a manic-depressive. But I didn’t pick up anything about it being this bad.”

Pope said her son, who grew up in Thousand Oaks and graduated from Newbury Park High School, had been tormented by depression for many years. He never held a job, never married or had children, she said.

“Michael was very artistic and very creative,” she said. “He painted, but he would never really follow through too much. Had he been well, he would have been gifted in the artistic field.

“When he was in first grade, he won first prize for a portrait of himself walking in the rain in a yellow rain coat. It was a very happy picture. It pleases me to remember that.”

Gutierrez is also survived by his father, Raul Gutierrez of Thousand Oaks, two brothers and a sister.