Crime & Safety
Could Train Horns Have Saved Joey Kramer?
Without Wauwatosa's 'quiet zone,' the train that hit Joey Kramer would have been required to start blowing its horn at least 15 seconds from the crossing where he was killed. An investigator believes that might have mattered.
Might Joey Kramer have lived if Wauwatosa had no quiet zones and the train that struck him been required to sound its horn no less than 15 seconds before reaching the 68th Street crossing?
For anyone who followed the coverage of Joey's death on Feb. 27, 2012, or has reviewed any published reports since, the answer would be, "Obviously not."
All media reports the next day, including Wauwatosa Patch's, which were based on the Milwaukee County medical examiner's report, said that the train crew had seen Joey from a great enough distance that they were able to sound their horn several times before reaching the crossing – and even saw that he was wearing earbuds.
"The train operators, an engineer and conductor, blew the train's horn several times but, they told investigators, they never saw Joey look up," this reporter wrote that day in a story headlined, "Train Crew Was Helpless to Avoid Tragedy in Boy's Death." "They were so close they could see that Joey was wearing earbuds under his hood."
But former Wauwatosa Assistant Fire Chief Mike Anton, during an interview Monday for a story on the lifting of the city train horn ban last week, also said he had investigated the accident much more thoroughly in the nearly one and a half years since it happened, and he believes all those accounts were wrong – that the train was actually almost on top of Joey before any horn sounded.
Consequently, Anton also believes there is a chance Joey could have been saved by required horn warnings further from the crossing.
Anton told Wauwatosa Patch that through connections he has made with railroad industry officials, he had learned that the Canadian Pacific Railroad's internal accident investigation came to other conclusions.
He said confidential sources told him the company's reconstruction of events determined that the crew couldn't have seen Joey on the tracks in time to blow their horn more than once, and that only a moment before striking him.
"Joey Kramer was walking north on the east side of the street," Anton said. "There was a line of cars already backed up, waiting at the crossing. They were between him and the train crew. They didn't see him.
"Even if they had noticed him, they would have had no reason to think he was going to step into the crossing."
The train was eastbound on the north set of tracks. Joey, Anton said, would have been seen no sooner than when he walked past the gates and onto the south set of tracks.
"The train was found to be traveling at 35 mph," Anton said. "They would have had just seconds to see him and to react."
Joey was already in the path of the train before the crew sounded the horn, Anton said, based on his CP sources' statements.
A matter of time
Count out 15 seconds. Feel how long that really is if you imagine it's in a life-or-death situation.Anton acknowledged that it's possible Joey would not have heard horn anyway, even if it had been blown the required 15 seconds – or no more than 20 – away from the crossing, if it weren't for the quiet zone.
At the same time, he's convinced that Joey would have had a chance.
The tragedy of Joey's death was compounded, multiplied, by how bizarre and unthinkable it seemed at the time. How could a boy, even listening to music through earbuds, not hear a train horn sounding so close?
He had already walked practically under the clanging bells of the crossing gate without noticing, but a horn at that distance would have been deafening loud.
Nevertheless, that was the conclusion of the medical examiner and police – Joey never heard the train horn over his music.
On March 1, 2012, three days after Joey died, Wauwatosa Patch published a story headlined, "Earphone Accidents Are More Common Than You Might Think." It was based on a University of Maryland study that showed many accidents had occurred just as Joey's had been reported.
In fact, the number of such accidents – people being struck while wearing headphones – had triple since 2004 and the widespread use of personal music players. Researchers described an "inattentional blindness" from distraction and sensory deprivation while using electronic devices.
Wauwatosa Patch also learned from a sister site in Wyandotte, MI, that the day after Joey Kramer was killed here, 14-year-old Jacob Marion was critically injured there under remarkably similar circumstances.
Jacob, though, was walking along the tracks, wearing headphones and listening to music. In his case, the train crew definitely saw him at a considerable distance and without question blew multiple blasts on the locomotive's horn. And Jacob gave no sign of having heard a thing.
We can never know whether a required train horn would have mattered, and Mike Anton knows it very well, he said. But, he said, too, there is a chance – the difference between a few seconds and at least 15 seconds – that Joey could have been brought out of his bubble of music in time to have jumped away.
Wauwatosa Patch is in the process of requesting from the Federal Railroad Administration any public record reports of the accident.
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