Daniel Garza spent the first quarter-hour of his train ride Monday hunched over a notebook, making a list of things to do once he arrived at his South Bend advertising business.
There was a bang, and, in a silence he remembered as absolute, he found himself flying backward. He crashed onto the floor.
Dazed and bloody from a 6-inch, bone-deep gash in his head, Garza tried to crawl back to his seat. It was gone, and so were six or seven rows of seats behind it. Instead, there was a jagged hole.
The train car’s metal side had been peeled back as if by a giant can opener. The seats that remained in the car had been pushed together like the pleats of an accordion.
“You knew there were people smashed in between, but all you could see was their shoes sticking out,” said Garza, 22, of South Bend.
As Garza dragged himself toward help, he passed through a gantlet of almost unimaginable horror, an aisle slick with blood and littered with severed limbs.
The scene would shock even the hardened rescue workers who arrived moments later, scrambling up the sides of a steep, snow-covered embankment to the two Chicago, South Shore & South Bend Railroad trains, which came to rest about 55 feet away from each other after their collision. They remained upright on their tracks.
The crash, on the west side of Gary, apparently was the result of a missed or malfunctioning signal that should have kept the two cars from being in the same place at the same time.
Seven people died and 69 were injured as a result. It was the worst train disaster in the Chicago area since 1977, when 11 died after two elevated train cars were knocked off their tracks in the Loop.
Inside the cars Monday, passengers, many of them still silent with shock, helped each other as they could. Two men led Garza down the hill to an ambulance that took him to St. Catherine Hospital in East Chicago, the town where he had boarded the train after spending the weekend with his parents. Doctors sewed up his head wound and treated the severe bruises along his left leg.
When Gary Firefighters Mark Jones, Cary Darnell and Lenzo Aaron Jr., climbed up the hill to the wrecked trains, Reginald Scott’s head was hanging out an opening.
“He just said, `Help me, help me,’ ” said Aaron, 31. “I said, `We’re going to help you. Just hang in there.’ “
Jones saw a pair of legs protruding from Scott’s body and wondered to himself how the man’s body could be so twisted.
“Then I realized it was a woman’s legs,” he said. They belonged to a crash victim who was wedged beneath Scott. Her hands were still pressed to her face. And between her and Scott was still another dead body, that of a man.
The three firefighters worked for 90 minutes with air-powered spreaders and cutters to free Scott, talking non-stop to reassure him. The last living person pulled out of the train, the 30-year-old Chicago resident was listed in fair condition Monday night with a fractured femur at Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn.
The firefighters made a videotape of the inside of one of the train cars, a horror film that made it clear at least one of the victims had been decapitated. One of the aluminum walls had been compressed so that only “CHGO” remained visible where the city’s name had been.
Trained to extricate bodies from wrecks, the three had expected trauma, but not of this magnitude.
“We knew it was going to be bad because it was train versus train,” Aaron said. “We didn’t know how bad until we got up on it.
“The ones that died, died instantly,” said Aaron. “We moved on to the living. You have to move on to the living.”
They moved from seat to seat like automatons, he said. For Aaron, it was work made even more grisly by a fact that terrified him: His wife usually rides that train.
“I was looking at every person, looking real close at them,” he said. “I didn’t want to see, but I just had to keep working.”
At one point, he said, “I saw a limp hand and a head opened up. It looked like a mannequin. A cracked mannequin.”
It was not until he got home later that Aaron was sure that his wife, at least, had escaped the accident. She was running late Monday morning and missed the train.
Many of those who were on the two trains were able to walk away from the accident, pulling themselves down the hill with the orange ropes provided by rescue workers.
“A lot of the walking wounded had already left the train and were walking around outside,” said Capt. Robert Groszewski of the Gary Fire Department. “Anybody who was not injured was helping somebody.”
Groszewski had to make some hard decisions himself, he said. “If they were dead, I just bypassed them. It sounds cruel, but. . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.
Jerome Holmes, who was riding the eastbound train on his way to work at Britcom Telemarketing in Merrillville, said the car was still rocking when he walked to the front after the crash.
“I was able to move one lady out from the rubbish,” said Holmes, 37, of Chicago. “When I looked up, there was another lady who had been totally decapitated. And there was blood everywhere.”
Even those accustomed to bloodshed found the tragedy difficult.
“You really had to draw on your strength to stay there and do the work to help the people in need,” said Gary Police Chief David Wade.
As the rescues continued-with dozens of ambulances lining the snow-packed streets-hundreds of onlookers gathered at the foot of the embankment. Some even hauled themselves up the sides for a better view.
One man shuffled through a handful of Polaroid snapshots he had taken. Others used video cameras. The cul-de-sacs on either side of the trestle were so packed with gapers’ cars that people waited 20 minutes or more to get out.
Close to noon, emergency workers were still pulling the last of the injured and dead out of the cars, using a cherry picker to lower them to the ground.
One man lay on a stretcher, his face covered in blood and one blue tennis shoe placed on his chest. Next to him was a body already encased in a blue body bag. It was loaded directly into a hearse.
At about 2:30 p.m., the last of the bodies had been removed, and the trains had been finally cleared from the track, taken to a railyard in Michigan City. But the horror was not over.
About 90 minutes later and about 3 miles east of the accident site on 5th Avenue, a woman walked into Kaufman Funeral Home on the arm of a man who, although he didn’t wear a uniform, had the stony demeanor of a police officer.
She was ushered into a back room. Moments later, her cries pierced the lobby, where a knot of reporters waited.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”
