4-Year-Old Boy Killed by Train; Man Loses Leg

A 4-year-old boy was killed and a man seriously injured Saturday when they were struck by a passenger train as they tried to use a railway bridge to cross over a major thoroughfare.

The man, whose lower left leg was severed in the accident, was identified as John Allinson, 36, of Lake Forest. The boy was identified as Christian Endoso, also of Lake Forest.

Allinson’s two daughters, ages 5 and 1 1/2, also were with him but escaped injury in the 12:15 p.m. accident, an Orange County Fire Authority spokesman said.

Capt. Dan Young said Allinson might have been hit as he tried to save the boy from injury after the child ran toward the approaching Amtrak train. Allinson told a nurse preparing him for surgery later that his daughters saw the train coming and ran away, but the boy raced toward it and was killed on impact, the official said.

“He reached the child at the same time the train did,” Young said. Allinson apparently was baby-sitting or caring for the boy Saturday, but the relationship between the two was not known. A Sheriff’s Department spokesman said the two might have been neighbors.

Doctors at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana were trying late Saturday to reattach Allinson’s left leg below the knee, hospital officials said. Allinson, who was airlifted to the hospital, was listed in serious but stable condition and was being treated by a team of trauma and reimplantation specialists.

A woman who answered the phone at Allinson’s home Saturday evening said his family was in seclusion and grieving over the accident.

Allinson and the children apparently were using the railroad bridge between Jeronimo Road and Overlake Drive to try to cross over Lake Forest Drive, the Fire Authority spokesman said. A number of residents in the area use the overpass as a shortcut across the thoroughfare, which is six lanes wide at that point, he said. The drop from the bridge to the street is about 30 feet.

“We don’t know why [Allinson] was on the tracks, but there isn’t a reason that would justify it,” Young said. “Unfortunately, it’s probably one of those things that seems pretty harmless when the tracks are empty, but the bottom line is these tracks are not a place to be.”

Young said the tracks in the area are new and trains pass over them with minimal noise, providing little or no warning to anyone nearby.

The child was dragged or thrown nearly 60 feet from the point of impact, the spokesman said. Allinson was still lying on the tracks when paramedics arrived.

Late Saturday, the bridge and its two sets of tracks, which are separated by about 12 feet of broken rock, were deserted.

A resident of a nearby mobile home park made the first report of the incident, Young said. By the time paramedics and sheriff’s deputies arrived a few moments later, crisis volunteers from a Lake Forest trauma intervention program also were on the scene, comforting the two uninjured children and consoling friends and relatives of the victims, he said.

The crew of the Amtrak train, the northbound No. 577 from San Diego to Los Angeles, was so traumatized by the accident that they asked to be relieved for the remainder of the day, Amtrak officials said.

“We had a three-man crew, including the engineer, and they are extremely distraught,” Amtrak spokeswoman Dawn Soper said.

The train was approaching the Irvine station at the time of the accident. Soper said the maximum allowable speed on that stretch of track is 79 mph and she questioned estimates by sheriff’s investigators that the train was traveling at 90 mph.

“The speed tapes that are included in each train will be studied to find out how fast our train was going,” she said. “But at this time we have no reason to believe that our engineer was exceeding the maximum speed.”

Soper said the engineer, who was not identified, saw people on the tracks and sounded the whistle several times and applied the brakes. But she said that even at 79 mph, it takes more than a mile for the train to stop.

The accident caused Amtrak service to be halted for about 2 1/2 hours.

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Times staff writer Geoff Boucher contributed to this report