Metrolink train hits car; 2 die, 1 injured

A car whose driver apparently ignored lowered crossing gates was struck and thrown 75 feet by a Metrolink train Sunday afternoon in Covina, killing the man and his niece, and seriously injuring the man’s 12-year-old daughter.

None of the approximately 160 passengers or crew members aboard the four-car passenger train were injured. The train was on its way from Los Angeles to Riverside, said Sgt. John Curley of the Covina Police Department.

The surviving girl was airlifted to Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. Police would not describe the nature of her injuries.

Passengers on the train waited for nearly three hours as workers cleared the tracks before buses came to take them to Riverside.

Preliminary information suggests that the driver of the car, Earl Brown, 53, of Covina, got through the crossing gates. Brown and his 10-year-old niece died at the scene of their injuries.

Police would not release the names of the two girls, who were in the back seat with their seat belts on when the accident occurred.

Curley said it was not clear Sunday whether Brown had been trying to go around the gates to beat the train.

“As of this time there is indication that the railroad crossing arms were functioning properly, so they were down,” Curley said.

He said police were still trying to determine whether Brown was trying to navigate through the crossing gates “or something else in the roadway caught his attention that caused him to go through.”

The train had just stopped at the Covina station and was traveling about 40 mph when it hit Brown’s Mitsubishi Galant at 1:57 p.m. at the Barranca Avenue crossing. The car was totaled, Curley said.

Trains are permitted to travel up to 79 mph in that stretch of track, Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrell said. She said that the engineer saw the car but could not stop in time, adding that it takes one-third of a mile to stop a heavy and fast-moving train.

She said the Father’s Day accident may have involved an optical effect known as looming, which makes it impossible to judge the speed or distance of an oncoming train.

“You may think that train is quite a distance away, and it’s not moving very fast,” Tyrell said. “It may look that way to you from a vehicle, but it’s not possible to make that judgment.”

The train was originally scheduled to arrive in Riverside at 3:30 p.m., after stopping in San Bernardino.

The tracks were cleared by 5 p.m., Tyrell said, allowing other eastbound and westbound trains to travel through the area.

The deaths were the third and fourth involving Metrolink trains in 2007, Tyrell said. Earlier this year, a train killed a pedestrian, and another person was fatally injured when a train struck a car at a crossing.

Online data collected by the Federal Railroad Administration does not show any other accidents in the past decade involving vehicles and passenger or freight trains at the Barranca Avenue crossing.

Barranca is a busy north-south street about half a mile east of the Metrolink station in Covina.

“It’s always a sad day when something like this happens,” Tyrell said. “All we can do at this point is ask other people to remember that the train is moving very fast and not to attempt to race the train because it can end in tragedy.”

myron.levin@latimes.com

steve.hymon@latimes.com