Family Is Glad to Be Home After Amtrak Ordeal

The 9-year-old has a cast on her wrist. The 16-month-old is having nightmares. But the Jepson family of Port Hueneme arrived safely at Oxnard Airport on Wednesday after surviving an Amtrak wreck in the Arizona desert.

Clinging to a brown teddy bear and wearing a cast on her wrist, 9-year-old Katy Jepson didn’t want to talk about the night that the train went off the tracks.

“I’m happy to be home and I just want to forget about it,” Katy said, adding that her 4-year-old sister, Jenny, talked too much about it. “Jenny does not understand that we do not want to talk about it.”

Katy, her four younger siblings and parents were traveling home on Amtrak’s Sunset Limited when the train derailed at a bridge near Phoenix early Monday.

“It’s the end of a long, agonizing trip,” said Katy’s father, Bryan Jepson, who helped rescue passengers after the wreck. “The experience was worse than the [Northridge] earthquake.”

Jepson, his wife Cheryl and their children, age 9 to 3 months, boarded the train Saturday afternoon in Dallas and were scheduled to return to Port Hueneme on Monday.

Instead, they were delayed when saboteurs derailed the train shortly after 1 a.m., injuring more than 100 people and killing an Amtrak employee.

After making sure that their children were safe, Jepson, a plumber at Port Hueneme’s Naval Construction Battalion Center, and his wife pulled two women out of a sleeping car that landed at a 45-degree angle in a dry wash about 50 miles southwest of Phoenix.

“My priority was getting the kids away from the scene,” Jepson said. “It was a horrifying place to be--people were screaming and the only light we had was that of a full moon.”

Cheryl Jepson said this was the first time that the family had traveled on a train.

“We were having a great time. The kids loved seeing the countryside and it was a lot of fun,” said Cheryl, who spent a night in a hospital because of injuries to her neck and back. “But when the accident happened, it became a nightmare.”

The Jepsons had traveled to Dallas on Sept. 9 to visit Cheryl Jepson’s father, Larry Vandecar, who died Sept. 28.

“It’s really been a horrifying journey,” she said.

Although her children were not afraid of flying from Phoenix to Oxnard, her 16-month-old daughter Rebecca has been having nightmares.

The bruises, bumps and injured bones will heal, but the emotional wounds left by a train going off the tracks may remain on her mind forever, Cheryl Jepson said.

“I’m just so grateful that none of my children were seriously injured,” she said. “And I hope time will take the memories away from their minds.”