Operator Who Ran Over Corpse Didn't Look Long Enough

Investigators are probing the case of the one-legged woman who was run over by 11 trains on the N tracks after falling between the cars. Arabell Lin's fall triggered the emergency switch, but the operator started the train up again after failing to find anything that flipped the switch. The 12-year veteran allegedly had two rules violations in the past 10 years. The MTA wouldn't say what they were, but admitted the operator didn't look long enough. Operators of 10 other trains failed to see Lin's body as well, leaving her body so mangled that cops relied on missing persons reports to identify her.

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By Jaya Saxena in News on August 10, 2010 3:50 PM

Comments [rss]

capt subway

I was a motorman (train operator) on the NY subway for almost ten years. For a number of years thereafter I was a road supervisor and then a manager. Rest assured, after having responded to several incidents of this type, that someone who falls between the cars of a moving train is almost certainly a "corpse" after falling under the first train. A second, third or eleventh train will not be necessary.

It is not recommended that one walk between the cars of a moving train - especially not if one has only one leg to start with.

jaycjay

Whether the odds are that she was already dead wasn't really my point. "Corpse" is generally used when someone's been dead a long time, or when an unidentified body has been found. When we know who someone was, it's disrespectful to say "it was just a corpse."

Look at it this way: while I'm not one of the commenting crew that calls "racism" at every opportunity, if this had been a 25-year old Barnard student and daughter of a noted physician, instead of a 25-year old Asian woman who went to SUNY Albany, would she be casually dismissed as "a corpse" or would we be reading about the joy she brought to her family and friends, and what a tragic loss her sudden death was?

I have no doubt -- none at all, not a shred -- that all that someone like that wouldn't be called a "corpse" in a story about her death.

jaycjay

She'd just fallen between two cars. Presumably she was under the train; no one knows whether she was still alive when the train proceeded.

A little early to dismiss her as a "corpse" isn't it? I mean, isn't it enough that everything else that made her who she was is forgotten as she's described only a "one-legged woman"?