Amtrak Train Kills Man Apparently Bent on Suicide

An unidentified man was struck and killed by an Amtrak train near Tampa Avenue in Northridge Sunday morning in what authorities said was a suicide.

Witnesses said the man “played Russian roulette” with one train, then simply waited on the tracks for another, refusing to budge despite the engineer’s persistent blowing of the whistle.

“He started taunting the train,” said Marianella Cruz of Northridge, who watched the scene from the nearby Price Club parking lot on Tampa north of Parthenia Street. “He was waving his arms around and just as the train went by, he jumped to the right,” off the track.

The engineer shouted curses as the first train sped by, Cruz said.

When a second train approached at 10:45 a.m., witnesses said, the man just stood on the track holding his head in his hands. He was killed instantly.

“He was just looking and staring at the train, waiting for it to come,” said Bob Aston of Torrance, who was also in the Price Club lot.

The man was struck so hard that pieces of his clothing were strewn along the tracks for about 150 yards, police said.

“It was an easy death, but awful,” said Officer Steve Keith of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Keith said that the train was carrying passengers to Santa Barbara. Among them, he said, were the family of one of the train’s crew members, who were planning to have breakfast in the coastal city before returning to Los Angeles.

A spokesman for the county coroner said the victim will have to be identified through fingerprints or dental records.

The spokesman said that the coroner’s office plans to rule the death a suicide, based on the eyewitness accounts of his actions in front of the two trains.