Teen Critical After Train and Car Collide

An Oxnard teen sustained serious head injuries early Thursday when his car was struck by a Metrolink train as he tried to drive across an unguarded rail crossing near Camarillo.

Juan Gabriel Lopez, who turned 19 Thursday, was in critical condition with skull and pelvis fractures after the crash, which occurred just north of 5th Street, about a mile east of Las Posas Road.

The southbound train slammed into the back of Lopez’s small Suzuki as he tried to cross the track after dropping off a friend who worked in a nearby strawberry field, said Officer Dave Webb of the California Highway Patrol.

The crash was the latest involving vehicles and trains at the county’s unguarded railroad crossings.

A few hours after the collision, a steady procession of friends and family made their way to the emergency room at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, where Lopez was taken for treatment.

Several relatives said prayers in the hospital parking lot while others remained hopeful they could help Lopez fulfill his dream of seeing his mother after an 18-year separation.

He was later transferred to Ventura County Medical Center.

Since 1992, 24 people have died in accidents involving Amtrak and Metrolink trains in Ventura County and another six were injured, according to the CHP.

The most recent fatal crash occurred Nov. 4 when an Amtrak train bound for Santa Barbara hit a truck in a Moorpark bean field, killing the driver, a Santa Paula man, and injuring his passenger and 29 people on the train.

Three of the train’s five cars derailed.

Like nearly every farm crossing in Ventura County, including the one in the fatal November crash, the site of Thursday’s incident contained no gate or lights. A red stop sign on a mound of dirt below the raised track was the only indication of the rail crossing.

Webb said the track is on private property, and land owners are not required to put up gates and warning lights.

Unguarded crossings are “standard for all lots in the agriculture areas,” Webb said. “The right of way for the railroad runs right through the bean and strawberry fields. . . . The fields are owned by somebody else and they would have to put up the costs for the gates.”

Metrolink is required to put up gates and flashing lights in publicly owned areas, said spokeswoman Claudia Keith. She said it can cost as much as $150,000 to assemble an electric gate.

“It is an ongoing discussion,” Keith said of unguarded crossings. “It’s costly to set up the lights. Who will pay for that?”

And even with the gates, people still try to get through, Keith said.

“It’s not a cure-all,” she said.

Relatives said they had birthday plans for Lopez, a former Hueneme High School student now working as a cashier at an El Pollo Loco restaurant on 5th Street in Oxnard.

He had asked his grandmother, who has raised him off and on for the past 18 years, to cook beef tostadas for his birthday party.

His father and aunt said they visited him in the emergency room and promised that they would try to locate his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since his parents separated in 1983, when he was an infant.

With nothing more than the woman’s name, a Social Security number and a vague idea that she may be in Northern California, his family planned to work the phones Thursday to let her know of her son’s condition.

His father, Francisco, 43, a Medford, Ore., fieldworker who has been visiting his son, said, “It’s his wish and he has always wanted it realized.”