Train-Crossing Deaths Leave a Trail of Grief : Mental Pictures of Wife’s Rescue Attempt Won’t Leave Widower’s Mind

Lee Kaiser has replayed the moment over and over in his mind, cursed with what he calls “one of those memories that stores pictures.”

On Thursday afternoon, he couldn’t turn the pictures off. Although his loving friends tried to keep the pain and the grief from being too great, the memories just wouldn’t go away.

What he kept recalling was how he and his wife tried--and failed--Wednesday morning to rescue Usha Waney, 47, after she tripped and fell, moments before being hit by a freight train near the depot in Del Mar.

Kaiser, 36, lost his bride of three months as well.

“I’m feeling the type of response that says, ‘Damn, I didn’t manage to get any of it right. I missed the lady on the tracks and lost my wife as well,’ ” he said Thursday from his home in Encinitas. “And, on the other hand, I’d probably do the same thing again. There was just enough time for one try.”

Kaiser couldn’t help but think that the his wife’s death might not have happened had he not started a new job as a design engineer at a Mazda plant in Irvine on Monday. On Wednesday, his wife was dropping him off at the train station.

Or, it might have been avoided had he not left his car in the parking lot at work. Ordinarily, he said, he would have driven to Orange County.

Kaiser said he and his wife, 44-year-old Roberta Halpern, had walked east from the Seagrove Parking lot across the ties and rails, and had reached the platform of the depot when they heard--and saw--Waney trip and fall. “Without a doubt” the woman was knocked unconscious, Kaiser said, making the task of lifting her from the tracks more difficult.

His memory had entertained a million second-guesses and instant replays by Thursday afternoon, and, he wondered, “if the woman had been of average weight, we might have succeeded (in lifting her off the tracks). She appeared to be rather heavy, and to complicate matters, she was wearing one of those loose, stretchy sorts of outfits.

“When I tried to get hold of something, all I got were handfuls of stretch material. I swiped across her body with my right hand, hoping for a belt, the obvious best handhold, but . . . I just couldn’t get one. From the time I moved toward the tracks, until I did a back flip off of them (toward the eastward depot platform), I don’t think I had more than seven seconds.”

Kaiser said he was grazed by the train but not injured seriously. His wife was hit full force but lived for hours before being declared “brain-dead” at 4:40 p.m. by doctors at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla.

Ironically, “Bobbie” Halpern, as friends called her, was no stranger to hospitals in La Jolla, where much of her work as a cancer researcher took place. She had worked at the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation and in a private laboratory under the auspices of Dr. Heinz Kohler.

Kaiser said the circumstances of his wife’s death were in keeping with her life. She also had arranged to give her bodily organs to science after she died.

“This was a tremendously giving person,” he said. “Not just to me, but to everyone she came in contact with. This was simply an extension of her normal personality. I mean, she knew this woman was going to die, and we did everything we could . . . “

Another friend of Halpern’s, 23-year-old Kim Taylor, said they shared the passion of paragliding, which combines the most rigorous elements of hang-gliding and parachuting. Taylor said Halpern was also an accomplished triathlete, having completed several of the bike-swim-run endurance tests.

Halpern had paraglided off 2,000-foot Mt. Soboba near Hemet more than once, but she was hardly a brazen risk-taker, Taylor said.

“She was quite cautious, and no, I wouldn’t call her a daredevil,” Taylor said with a small laugh. “She was very outgoing, very active, very diverse. She loved life and lived it to its fullest, settling for nothing less.

“The way she flew (paragliding) was always within her limits, her carefully defined boundaries. The same was true of her biking and running. She was never out there trying to kill herself.”

“We’re all quite shocked about it,” Lisa Berquist, a co-worker of Halpern’s, said about the death of her friend. “I just think it was a really heroic effort on her part and real tragic. Bobbie was 44 but looked real young for her age. She was the kind of person who really enjoyed life. She tried a lot of things and was real motivated at everything she did.”

Taylor said that Halpern moved to San Diego from her native New York City seven years ago. She is survived by a twin brother and a stepmother. Her father died four years ago, and her mother died when she was 3 months old, according to Kaiser, Halpern’s husband.

He met his wife in a sushi bar--an appropriate setting, he said, because both newlyweds were enthusiastic about Japanese food and art and the Southern California lifestyle.

He said he has thought of the dozens of ways her death could have been prevented, about how he could still be sharing his life with her.

But he said he has no plans to sue, not knowing whom he would sue, or what good it would do.

“For what would I sue?” he said. “The railroad is not at fault. Nobody else is either. We tried to save somebody’s life, and we just didn’t make it work.”

But Kaiser, whose acumen as a design engineer has caused him to contemplate a better alternative than crossing over a rough-hewn path of gravel, rails and ties, said spiral staircases connected by a pedestrian overpass would be the “obvious” solution for the fatal flaw at the Del Mar depot.

He even suggested that he and Naveen Waney, the architect son of Usha Waney, would be the best collaborative team for such a project.

“I’d be perfectly happy to get together and design it with him,” he said. “I can’t think of any two people more qualified or who would care more about doing something about it.”