Ordinary Lives Derailed by Fate
When you think about the Southern California lifestyle, countless images come to mind, and none of them involve rolling out of bed before dawn and catching a train to the office.
The names and occupations of the people killed and injured in Wednesday’s train wreck struck me as a directory of the other Los Angeles. The real Los Angeles. In a place where the glamorous and the gangsters get plenty of airtime, here was this gathering of the invisible and anonymous, riding the rails to ordinary jobs.
The maintenance man.
The phone technician.
The meter reader.
The deputy sheriff.
The clerk-typist.
They were public servants for the most part, making things work for the rest of us by day, and returning to their families by night, sharing a train in the city of cars.
Scott McKeown, for instance. A train nut, McKeown, 42, was the phone guy for the city of Pasadena after many years in Glendale. The husband of Susan, father of Ashley, 8, and Bryce, 5, McKeown was on the Metrolink train from Moorpark, sitting behind the engineer in the lead car.
“Susan called me at 6:50 or 7 and said, ‘I can’t get hold of Scott,’ ” says Joe Wilke, Scott’s best friend and fellow train enthusiast.
She’d heard about the accident and so had Wilke, who drove to the crash site hoping to find his buddy alive and well. Sometimes on weekends, Scott and Joe would take the kids on a train ride, maybe get ice cream somewhere.
Ashley was Scott’s daughter, and he was her daddy, says Joe Wilke. “The love there was unbelievable.”
Wilke couldn’t find Scott. But at the police station, he found Scott’s brother Todd, and the two of them got the news from another family member.
When I spoke to Wilke on Thursday, he was driving to Moorpark to see Scott’s wife and children. The McKeowns had moved there several years ago from Glendale.
“They were looking for a place that provided a nice, safe family environment and good school system. It was a typical two-story home, nothing elaborate, no fancy cars. Scott drove a 1993 Jeep Cherokee, like the one that was struck by the train.”
Vicki Gardner, a public information officer for the city of Glendale, might have been on that train, perhaps sitting with McKeown. She drove to work though, because of a nail appointment.
McKeown was Glendale’s featured employee a few years ago, which meant that Gardner spent a day with him making a video. That was when he talked her out of her car and onto the train. He sold her on the efficiency, the romance, the communal experience in a city where we keep to ourselves, alone in our cars.
“I love it,” Gardner says. “I don’t know anyone on the train that could be called glamorous. There’s deputy sheriffs and nurses, city workers from Glendale and Los Angeles. It’s not Hollywood people and stockbrokers. It’s just average folks.”
There’s a comforting familiarity aboard a vessel that is both chariot and time capsule. You see old friends, you make new ones, and traffic is someone else’s headache.
And then came this one day of hell.
Scott Cox, a 29-year-old Glendale meter reader from Simi Valley, was sitting up one level from Scott McKeown, whom he always saw in his favorite seat behind the engineer. As the train approached Glendale, a man Cox had never seen, and would never see again, raced up the stairs and knelt down, holding on to a seatback.
Cox, assuming the man had seen through the window that they were about to crash, got down on his knees and held onto the back of the seat in front of him. After the horrific, wrenching crash, which tore Cox’s car open and tossed him around like a loose pebble in a tin can, he stood up.
The man kneeling next to him had disappeared.
“My seat was gone,” Cox said. “The whole back of the train was gone, and I think everybody behind me died. This may sound farfetched, and I’m not a religious person, but I think maybe the guy who ran up the stairs was my guardian angel.”
With two broken toes, bruised ribs and other injuries, Cox, a husband and father of three, assisted passengers worse off than himself and called to a Costco employee to get a fire extinguisher.
His own life saved, Cox would go home and find out he and his family were being evicted from their apartment. His wife, a clerical worker in a medical office, was temporarily out of work and they’re three weeks late with the January rent.
And yet it was his lucky day.
An addled, selfish man with an estranged family tried to kill himself, changed his mind, and destroyed the families of at least 11 citizens on their way to ordinary jobs while most of the city slept.
There is no rhyme or reason. There is only the chilling reminder that we live precariously and die randomly, and that there is honor in facing each day with purpose and grace.
Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.
