A Tragedy’s Legacy for LAPD, Media

It may not be on the books, but the law of unintended consequences applies in Los Angeles, as it does everywhere else. So, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the worst rail disaster in California history established the basic mechanism that oversees relations between the police and local news media to this very moment.

It all began one tragic day in 1956, when 30 people were killed and 131 injured in a train wreck whose aftermath--the press would charge--the Los Angeles Police Department bungled. The department fought back, accusing the media of exaggerating the disaster with inaccurate reports. An FBI probe into the controversy led to the creation of the LAPD’s Press Relations Unit.

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On Jan. 23, 1956, a Santa Fe Railway train, rolling like a silver streak through the early evening darkness 12 minutes out of Union Station, hurtled off a curve and derailed at the Redondo junction roundhouse near Washington Boulevard and the Los Angeles River.

Sparks flew as the San Diegan, a two-car commuter train carrying 178 passengers south to the port city, flipped on its side, slithering across the adjacent rain-slicked tracks. As seats were jerked loose from their mountings, a 17-year-old bride of one month, on her way to see her Marine husband stationed at Camp Pendleton, was killed. So were the parents of 6-year-old Tommy Ferguson. He and his 3-year-old sister, Cindy, escaped serious injury.

Carlos Bustamante, an 8-year-old who lost his arm, was rushed to Childrens Hospital, along with his injured mother, who became the first adult admitted to that facility.

It was the youngest victims who defined the Santa Fe train tragedy, as the image of lost innocents burned itself into the city’s consciousness. Almost a dozen children clung to life at various hospitals, most of them lying motionless. But they were the lucky ones.

A young mother and her 23-month-old son, returning home from a bridal shower, and an insurance man and his 7-year-old son were among the dead.

Lives of the passengers sitting on the right side of the coaches were spared, while many of those on the left side died when they were sucked out the windows. Seven victims would later be found underneath the train. After the cars skidded across 500 feet of rail and dirt, passengers scrambled through the wreckage in the dark, climbing through windows.

Heroes emerged: Four servicemen and one 13-year-old Arcadia boy crawled through the rubble in response to strangers’ groans, pulling about 20 injured passengers to safety.

Within an hour of the crash, KTTV Channel 11 arrived on the scene and began broadcasting live, while radio and other television stations interrupted regular programs with news of the disaster.

Early reports were exaggerated and hysterical. A transfixed audience of thousands of Southern Californians seeking information about the fate of friends and relatives was glued to the tube, while scores of others responded to the call for help.

Movie studios donated floodlights. Doctors, nurses and clergymen tended the victims, while the Salvation Army and Red Cross workers helped ease the pain of the grief-stricken. A dozen different authorities tried to tell railroad workers and media representatives what to do. Well-meaning rescue workers attempted to send bodies away without the coroner’s approval, while frantic relatives of the injured went from hospital to hospital in search of their loved ones.

As hundreds of volunteers lined up to give blood, looky-loos caused bumper-to-bumper traffic along Washington Boulevard and created havoc for ambulances trying to transport the injured.

From his hospital bed, with trembling hands and an anguished smile, engineer Frank Parrish, 61, said he had blacked out and thought he was running through an orchard on a section of the line posted for 90 mph. When the assistant engineer, Homer Smith, 42, yelled at him to “throw her into emergency” by using the dead-man brake, it was too late. Parrish said he took full responsibility for the accident.

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A government investigation team determined that the train hit the 15 mph curve at 70 mph. The police, acting on the presumption that there might have been criminal negligence because of excessive speed, launched their own investigation.

Mayor Norris Poulson attacked the railway by attributing the engineer’s blackout to his age and accusing the company of allowing “the oldest men to run the fastest trains.” The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers shot back that competence should be measured by ability, not age.

Finally, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that Parrish was a victim of a neurological attack, and that although he was conscious, his hands and mind were frozen.

Santa Fe settled 168 claims for about $2 million, and a federal court judge denied two damage suits by the engineer and his fireman, saying that they were responsible for the wreck and that evidence in the civil damage suits failed to show any mechanical failure of the brakes.

After a Times editorial strongly attacked Police Chief William Parker and the department’s handling of the disaster, the City Council called for an investigation. At the same time, Rep. Patrick Hillings asked the FBI to look into reports that “bona fide newsmen were manhandled and prevented from doing their job by the police.”

The FBI did find that the LAPD’s attempts to protect the confused scene had resulted in mass confusion and chaos. As a reporter scrambled for an exclusive, federal investigators later said, she was tied to a tree by the police. A photographer was reportedly assaulted and physically ejected from the scene after his camera was purposely broken by other officers.

Parker conceded that the department was not equipped to handle the press in the face of such disasters, and appointed Inspector Ed Walker to quell the bad feelings between the police and media and set up guidelines for the new press relations department.

Today, the press department routinely handles hundreds of media inquiries every week--unless, of course, there’s a celebrity crime or trial involved. Then the number of calls and contacts spirals into the thousands. And it all began with a train wreck.