Victim’s Fears Foretold Death by Train : Tragedy: A woman advised her architect student son, who is designing a rail station, to avoid a crossing like the one at Amtrak’s Del Mar station. A week later she died there.

Naveen Waney remembers the evening last week when he brought home a collegearchitecture project to discuss with his parents, a practice that was typical for the close-knit La Jolla family of five.

His mother, Usha, sat at the dinner table, listening to her son’s vision for a new train station in adjacent Solana Beach.

But she had one suggestion: The new station should avoid the design flaw that plagued the depot in nearby Del Mar--where rail passengers often dash across the tracks to catch their trains.

Exactly one week later, Usha Waney died on those same train tracks--at the very station she had expressed concerns about over that prophetic family dinner.

“It’s just so ironic,” Naveen Waney said Thursday, standing outside the family house as he shivered in the autumn morning’s chill. “My mom was concerned about how dangerous that crossing was.”

On Wednesday morning, just after she parked her car in a private parking lot on the west side of the tracks, Waney, a 47-year-old San Diego clothing designer, and a handful of other rail passengers heard the warning bell sound at a nearby crossing.

Mistaking the freight train warning for a departure signal from their Los Angeles-bound Amtrak train, the group of strangers ran through the parking lot toward the red-brick Del Mar depot.

Waney, who carried a briefcase full of business papers and fabric samples, stumbled on the tracks in front of the platform--striking her head on the steel rail.

As two dozen morning commuters watched in disbelief, Lee Kaiser and his wife, Roberta Halpern, dashed out to try to help the dazed Waney. But the train was too soon upon them.

Waney died instantly. Halpern, a researcher at a local cancer institute, sustained severe head injures and died several hours later. Her husband was not seriously injured.

But on Thursday, Lee Kaiser, 36, the only survivor of Wednesday’s grim tragedy, said he, too, was struck by an awful irony.

He had just started a job as a design engineer at a Mazda plant in Irvine. Had the timing of the train trip to Irvine been a day sooner, or a day later, his wife would still be alive, he said.

Ordinarily, he would have driven to Irvine, he said, but he had left his car in the company parking lot, making the train trip necessary. His wife was seeing him off at the station.

“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.”

The untimely deaths have shaken the usually reserved Waney family, who came to the United States from India in 1972. But the loss has been particularly hard for Naveen, who looked up to his mother both for her emotional support and intellectual guidance.

A student with considerable training in architectural design, he cannot understand why that dangerous, un-sanctioned crossing was allowed to be used for so long.

“Architects are supposed to think about how people will react within the spaces they create. So why aren’t there any signs warning people of the danger? It’s like these people are saying, ‘You’re on your own. You’re taking a risk. So get ready to pay the consequences.’ ”

Santa Fe railroad officials say that the pathway is not a public crossing and should not be used, even though it often saves hasty commuters from walking 25 yards south to a paved crossing.

“It’s not our fence and it’s not on our property,” Santa Fe spokesman Mike Martin said Thursday. “The ugly fact of life is that two people died at that spot. And now people are going to line up asking questions of liability, questions I can’t answer.”

On Wednesday night, Naveen and Michelle Six, his girlfriend of seven years, went back to the Del Mar depot “to see things with my own eyes, like an architect is trained to do.”

The son wanted to walk the same pathway where his mother tripped and fell. And he wanted to sit on the tracks to witness what she would have seen when the train barreled down on her.

As he perched on the rails, Naveen posed in his mind the same questions that had tortured his family over the previous 12 hours:

What if his mother had been only five minutes later? What if she had fallen only a few inches farther? And, for just one moment, did her hustle-bustle career make her fatally careless?

“The pressure of her job in the clothing industry made her grow strong,” he said. “There were nights when she stayed up past midnight working, waiting for calls from Hong Kong or somewhere else. But she always made time for her family.”

Times staff writer Michael Granberry contributed to this story.