Unbreakable Bond

The first thing John Phipps wants you to know is that he doesn’t know what all the fuss is about.

He was a passenger on a commuter train, that’s all. One moment he was asleep, rolling to his aerospace job in Burbank; the next moment morning mist was falling on his face from the open sky, and a pile of wreckage was pinning him to the floor.

What made him so sought-after is what he did next. He scrawled a note on an overturned seat with his own blood: “I {heart}my kids. I {heart}Leslie.”

“I didn’t think anyone would see it,” he said Thursday, after a week of recuperation and seclusion from frenzied reporters.

“I thought it would get swept away with the rest of the wreckage.”

It wasn’t.

Firefighters saw the note on the train seat after removing Phipps and told the story before news cameras.

A picture of the note was loaded onto the Internet. There the image buzzed through newsrooms across the world, providing a small counterbalance to the tragedy of a train accident on Jan. 26 that left 11 dead and 180 injured.

One fire official reported 700 media inquiries about the message in a single day.

By Thursday, Phipps decided that the media pressure was too intense to ignore. And besides, he said, he wanted to pay his respects to the firefighters who saved his life.

So he arrived at Fire Station 27 to present the inspiration of his message: his wife and his three children, Shara, 22; Jeremy, 19; and Josh, 15.

Redheaded and bearded, Phipps covered 24 stitches to his head with a Fire Department cap. A plastic mouthpiece protected what was left of four broken teeth. He leaned on crutches as he lumbered before dozens of news cameras set up in the station’s garage.

“These guys are the ones who deserve the applause,” he told the assemblage. “All I did was lay there.”

Phipps grimaced with pain as he settled into a seat.

“I got stitches where no guy would really want to have staples,” joked Phipps. “I was kicked where it counts by a 50-ton train and lived to tell about it.”

Leslie sat next to him, squeezing his hand when he choked up as he told his story.

His employer, Senior Aerospace in Burbank, was a little short-handed, so Phipps left home his home in La Mirada at 5 a.m. last Wednesday to catch an earlier train than usual. His family was still slumbering.

Soon after he boarded, the northbound Metrolink rocked him to sleep.

About an hour later, authorities allege, Juan Manuel Alvarez, 25, of Compton parked his SUV on the tracks and waited for the train to kill him. But at the last moment, police say, Alvarez changed his mind and left the vehicle just before the train hit it, causing a chain-reaction crash.

Phipps never felt the impact.

“Then I was looking up at a thin gray dawn mist coming down on my face,” he said. “I thought: I’m on my way to work. Mist should not be coming down on my face. This is a bad thing.”

Phipps realized that the mist was drifting through a smashed window.

He was flat on his back, and the seat he had been riding on rested on his chest. He reached behind his head. His hand came back bloody.

“Hello? A little help?” he called.

There was no answer. Though he did not know it then, two fellow passengers were lying dead a few feet away.

He was short of breath and his ribs hurt. He couldn’t lift his head.

“I was thinking what a lot of people that day were thinking: Why me Lord?”

And so, Phipps, a longtime choir member at his Presbyterian church, sang the hymn of that name and tried to get his bearings.

“I put my hand out and felt something solid and it turned out to be the chair,” he said. “My hand left a print.”

Using one finger, Phipps wrote what he thought might be his last words to his family.

“I don’t know why I did it,” he said. “Maybe I’m just what one of my children accused me of ... a maudlin dope.”

Just when he had started to despair, Phipps heard firefighters’ voices and footsteps in the wreckage. (At this point of his story, Phipps stopped and wiped tears from his eyes. His wife held tight. Phipps continued.)

After they freed him from the wreckage, Capt. Robert Rosario discovered Phipps’ heartfelt graffiti.

Leslie Phipps, a Sav-on Drugs branch manager, was at work when her mother-in-law called with news of the train accident. That was 8 a.m., but it was noon before she learned that her husband was at L.A. County-USC Medical Center.

Doctors there feared that Phipps’ pelvis was broken, that he had suffered brain damage, that he was bleeding internally. But, in fact, Phipps was in remarkably good shape considering what he had gone through.

“I’m more lucky than a lot of people,” he said.

While Leslie Phipps waited for her husband at the hospital’s trauma ward, a nurse printed the picture of the train seat from the Internet and handed it to Leslie. She said she recognized the handwriting.

“I don’t care how much work anyone ever does,” Leslie said Thursday. “Hallmark is never going to top this. It’s moving and thoughtful and chilling, all at the same time, to think that ‘I could have died here’ and to think of others first is just amazing.”

The others that Phipps was thinking about last Wednesday stayed by his side Thursday as he gave interviews to “Good Morning America,” “Inside Edition” and a whole alphabet of television news channels.

Phipps fielded questions about the accident, his family and even Alvarez, who is being held by Los Angeles Police and has been charged with 11 counts of murder.

“I heard he was suicidal. I’ve told my kids from an early age that there isn’t a thing on this planet worth giving up your own life for,” he said. “I hope he gets the help he needs, along with whatever the legal system has in store for him.”

Phipps said he is amazed at the public reaction to his story.

“I’m really, really shocked,” he said. “To me personally, it’s not unusual for me to tell my family that I love them, to the point of embarrassment.”

Phipps said his is a close-knit family. He and his wife met in high school, dated before either could drive and married when they were both 18. That was 26 years ago.

Even with two children past voting age, the entire family still lives at home. They go to church most Sundays and to all of their father’s choral engagements.

Phipps said he doubts the train accident will change him: “I have a good life, a good family.” But with Valentine’s Day around the corner, Phipps worries that some of his close friends have it in for him.

“I’m in trouble with all my buddies,” he said, laughing. “They tell me, ‘Dude, my wife punched me in the arm and said, ‘You wouldn’t leave me a message like that!’ ”