Keepers of the Gates : Patrols Set Up on Blue Line Crossings to Curb Crashes

Deputy Ken Bolks had staked out the intersection near 41st Street and Long Beach Avenue, looking for motorists who dart in front of Blue Line trains, when five shots from an AK-47 were fired behind his patrol car.

“I guess we aren’t wanted here,” said Bolks, throwing his car into gear and driving away.

To the puzzlement of many residents in an area that has become a battlefield for more than 100 gangs, Bolks and a team of deputies focus on a very specific type of lawbreaker--the pedestrians and motorists who race the Blue Line. These scofflaws scoot beneath crossing gates or make illegal turns in front of oncoming trains despite flashing red lights, piercing whistles and bells.

Since the Blue Line began service in July, 1990, there have been 135 Blue Line-related accidents in which nine were killed and 57 were injured. The most recent accident occurred Saturday when a woman escaped with minor injuries after a train clipped the rear of a car in which she and a 9-year-old girl were passengers.

The record is a gruesome one that officials hope to end.

“If we can keep a mother with her children from going around the gate and getting killed; to me, that’s just as important as stopping a shooting,” said Capt. Frank Vadurro, commanding officer of the Transit Services Bureau, which patrols the Blue Line for the Sheriff’s Department.

In June, officials launched a three-month program to catch crossing violators along the 22 miles of Blue Line track, which penetrates South-Central as it travels between Los Angeles and Long Beach. During that period, 10 deputies ticketed almost 8,000 violators. On the average, the deputies--working in the city’s most crime-ravaged neighborhoods--ticketed about 600 drivers a week.

Officials decided to continue the program with eight deputies through next June. With the decreased force, they average about 1,200 tickets a month, Vadurro said. “Our aim is not so much to write citations as it is to keep the deaths from occurring.”

Many of those who are caught become irate that here, where gunfire commonly punctuates the afternoon, they are being targeted for traffic tickets. For them, it is one of the surreal ironies of the city.

“You should stop the crack dealers around the corner instead of bothering me,” said a 34-year-old supervisor who works at the Bicycle Club casino and was cited for zipping through the rail crossing as red lights were blinking. “It’s a bunch of b.s.”

But every day streams of pedestrians trundle across the tracks where the Blue Line trains can reach speeds up to 55 m.p.h. And drivers, hoping to save a minute, ignore warning lights and dodge descending crossing gates.

It’s an elaborate dance in which the partners inevitably get too close. “You shoulda seen this guy when the crossing gate came down on top of his car,” one deputy said.

Many of these violators are accustomed to the lethargic pace of the Southern Pacific trains, which sometimes stop for 15 minutes at a time, paralyzing intersections. Thinking that they have plenty of time to get around the parked freight trains, drivers pull around the gates--forgetting that the much speedier Blue Line also uses the same intersections on a parallel set of tracks.

“The majority of people are a thousand miles away, worrying about their jobs, about their kids. And they are in a hurry; they go around the gates and won’t even look,” said Michael Mathieu, who has been a Blue Line operator for the last year. “They run from the train to the bus, from the bus to the train. They’ve got some appointment, they’ve got something to do and they’ve got to do it now, this second.”

In fact, Blue Line trains usually delay motorists for less than a minute, officials say. At most intersections, the red lights flash for about three seconds. Then the crossing arm begins to slowly descend. A driver can be ticketed for entering the intersection anytime after the warning lights begin blinking. But many officers act only after the gates begin to drop.

During two recent days when a reporter accompanied deputies, violators offered a litany of excuses: They didn’t see the lights or hear the warning bells, they were afraid they would get hit from behind if they stopped or didn’t have time to stop, or they were just following the car in front.

Any excuse is fair, it seems, in trying to dodge a ticket. When Deputy Chris Anderson pulled over two men at 16th Street and Long Beach Avenue the driver protested, saying he was just trying to get his elderly father to surgery on time.

As he spoke, the driver waved a hospital envelope as though it were a passport.

“My father is sick with pains,” he told Anderson. “We are in an emergency.”

Anderson asked to read the hospital letter. It did indeed say that surgery was warranted. But the date for the surgery was a week earlier. Too late; Anderson had already said he would not ticket the driver and he honored his word.

“Now the egg is on my face,” said Anderson, shaking his head as he walked away.

Other times, however, the tales are sad. Drivers say they will lose their jobs because the fines--which can range up to $250--will deplete their meager savings.

Jose Nieves, a 22-year-old gang member, burst into tears when deputy Ed Arocha pulled him over. “I didn’t even see anything,” Nieves said. “I didn’t even hear the bell.”

Nieves recounted how he had just broken up with his girlfriend of five years after she went on a one-week crack binge. Not only that, but she’d given him a venereal disease before she dumped him, he said. And the tears streamed down his face. It turned out that Nieves had no driver’s license and he had chalked up more than $10,000 in outstanding warrants. He went to jail.

In a Sheriff’s Department survey last week of 1,500 drivers who were given citations, the largest group of violators--about 40%--told deputies that they had crossed in front of the oncoming train because they “thought it was safe.” Another 28%--like Nieves--said they had not seen any warning signals, and 25% said they were in a hurry.

On a recent afternoon, Phil Goldstein was rushing to get to the bank before it closed. But a Southern Pacific freight train had stopped, partly blocking the intersection near 41st Street and Long Beach Avenue. Goldstein was one of a string of motorists who drove around the lowered gate.

Deputy Bolks nabbed Goldstein, who runs an offset printing company in South-Central.

“What did I do?” Goldstein asked from behind the wheel of his gold station wagon. “Everybody went around the gate. I think this is lousy. If I had purposefully done something wrong, that’s one thing. But when that train stopped and the gate went down and I know how long they sit there.”

Goldstein had hoped to get to a downtown bank in the 20 remaining minutes before closing time. Instead, he got the ticket.

“How come you just got me and not everybody else?” he asked Bolks. “I’m going to fight this.”

But Bolks, a Michigan native who did “running-and-gunning” patrol work before this assignment, remained cool. “You’ve got to be patient to do this work, you really do,” he said. “If you’re not, you’ll end up in a lot of trouble. Some guys woulda jumped in (Goldstein’s) face, I look at it this way: That would just give him the satisfaction of seeing me upset.

“I don’t think he realizes what he did was very dangerous. He could have gotten splattered all over the street.”

Bolks stakes out intersections with the aplomb of a fisherman casting his line. During rush hour, the trains flash by every few minutes. He sits in his patrol car, watches and waits. On an average shift, he will issue 10 tickets. Once, at Long Beach Avenue and 20th Street, he pulled over three cars at a time for blowing past rail warnings. But usually, he nabs his quarry one at a time.

When shots were fired behind his patrol car last week, he shrugged it off: “Gunfire is common around here. They don’t want us jumping in and handling stuff that’s not related to what we’re doing.”

For train operator Ronnie Bean, seeing a car like Goldstein’s station wagon dart out when the gates are down sends the adrenaline racing through his body.

Last spring, Bean was driving the Blue Line southbound at 6:30 a.m. one morning when a van came around a gate. Bean leaned on the horn. He hit the emergency brake. He felt overwhelmingly helpless as he realized that he could not swerve out of the way, nor could he do anything to stop the train sooner.

As the train hurtled down the track, Bean, 45, believed he was about to die.

“I hit the van in the middle on the passenger side,” Bean said. “It just literally wrapped around the front of the train. I thought this is it.”

As the train smashed into the van, the driver was thrown through the windshield. He lay crumpled on the ground, his arms, ribs and a kneecap broken, internal organs injured. The driver survived.

Bean doesn’t like to talk about the accident. And yet he cannot completely escape it: He has had terrible dreams and he still occasionally flashes back to the crash.

In his mind, it is like an equation that doesn’t add up. Why did the driver do it? For a few seconds that he hoped to save.

“These people, they don’t know what they are playing with,” Bean said. “They are flirting with death.”