Toddler Playing on Railroad Track Killed

An 18-month-old toddler playing on a railroad track in Encinitas was hit and killed Saturday morning by a southbound Amtrak train that had been traveling at 88 m.p.h.

The approaching engineer spotted Geraldo Santiago Andreas, who had wandered off from his home nearby, and applied the emergency brakes, but the train still struck the child at about 60 m.p.h. and dragged the body before coming to a stop, authorities said.

“He was killed instantly,” said George Dickason, a county medical examiner investigator. It was the seventh train-related death in San Diego County since early last October.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Roy Stamper said the unidentified engineer “tooted his horn and (the child) stood up,” but the passenger train was going too fast to halt on time.

“They’re like a nonstop bomb going down the road--if they see it, they can hit it,” Stamper said. “There have been a lot of fatalities along the Del Mar-Encinitas route.”

He said the boy had wandered away from his home several blocks from the tracks and was dead by the time his mother, Guadalupe Reynoso, noticed him missing.

The child was killed at 9:55 a.m. and “his mom called us about 11 minutes later saying she didn’t know where her son was,” Stamper said.

Authorities quickly matched the woman’s description of the child’s clothing with that of the victim, and sheriff’s representatives went to the family’s home on the 300 block of North Vulcan.

The mother “emotionally just caved in,” Stamper said.

According to a Sheriff’s Department statement, Geraldo had been gone a matter of minutes when the Amtrak engineer saw “an object” on the west side of the tracks as the train approached the Leucadia Boulevard crossing.

The engineer sounded the whistle twice and “the object moved and became recognizable as a child,” according to the statement. The emergency braking system slowed the train, but it still skidded about 300 yards before slamming into Geraldo and dragging him an unknown distance.

Stamper said, “When they hit him, he was hit at 60 m.p.h.”

There were initial reports that the child’s older brother was at the scene during the mishap, but Stamper said that wasn’t confirmed.

Both the sheriff andSanta Fe Railroad are investigating.