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Man Took Dismembered Body in Suitcase on Train

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A homeless man killed his wife in an abandoned California restaurant, dismembered her body and carried it aboard a light-rail train in a suitcase before burning her remains outside a home improvement store, Los Angeles police said Tuesday.

Investigators believe Valentino Gutierrez killed his wife last week in Pasadena, Deputy Chief Justin Eisenberg said.

He took the train a few stops then rode his bicycle — with the suitcase in tow — to the parking lot of a Home Depot in the Cypress Park neighborhood, where he set the suitcase ablaze, Eisenberg said. (Read more from “Man Took Dismembered Body in Suitcase on Train” HERE)

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Raw Footage: Unconscious Man Passed out on Train Tracks, Pulled to Safety Moments Before Disaster

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Cell phone footage captured the dramatic rescue of a man who was unconscious on the train tracks last week.

Linda Vicente, who shot the video, was waiting for a Q train at the Avenue H station in Flatbush, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, when she spotted the man lying on the tracks.

“It was the most scariest thing,” one of the witnesses told News 12 Brooklyn. “This man, slipped down on the platform and he passed out.”

“Sir? Sir, please wake up,” Vicente yelled in the video. “Sir! Please wake up! Sir, wake up!”

The other people on the Avenue H platform ran down toward the oncoming train, yelling for it to stop.

“I thought the train was going over him, I started crying,” Vicente told ABC News. “I had never seen that.”

The train stopped short of the station, and Vicente and two others, with the help of the people on the platform, pulled the man to safety.

“You hear stories, but when you’re there it’s so different, the feeling,” she told News 12.

After being pulled to safety, the man regained consciousness and asked to go home. He is still in the hospital in serious condition, but is expected to survive, News 12 reported.

Twitter users shared the story of these good Samaritans.

Vicente told ABC that seeing people pitch in to save a stranger’s life was rewarding.

“I think there are still kind people here in this world,” she said.

Vicente shrugs off the notion that people are calling her a hero. She told News 12 she was just doing the right thing. (For more from the author of “Raw Footage: Unconscious Man Passed out on Train Tracks, Pulled to Safety Moments Before Disaster” please click HERE)

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Yes, Amtrak Train Was Sabotaged – by Congress

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Photo Credit: Quartz Ever since privately owned freight railroads were freed by Congress in 1970 from their public service obligation to operate unprofitable intercity passenger trains—a law that created publicly owned Amtrak—a debate has raged in the US over how much passenger rail service is enough, how fast passenger trains should travel, why passenger trains aren’t profitable, and who should provide the subsidy that keeps them afloat.

Amtrak loses money, as do all rail passenger systems across the globe. . .

While government subsidies keep Amtrak trains running, those sums perennially fall short of fully satisfying Amtrak’s capital-investment needs—like the purchase of new locomotives and passenger cars, plus renewal of track, signals, bridges, and stations.

Among some 500 bridges that along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (NEC) between Washington, DC, and Boston—each a century or more old, and requiring extensive rehabilitation—is one spanning New Jersey’s Hackensack River. It needs a $1.5 billion replacement. New tunnels under the Hudson River to replace 115-year-old twin bores come with a $13.5 billion price tag. Another $1.2 billion is required to replace a 142-year-old tunnel under Baltimore. Overhead catenary delivering electricity to trains dates to the 1930s. New safety systems, which might have prevented the Philadelphia fatal derailment and which are nearing completion along the NEC’s entire length, have siphoned substantial, scarce, dollars. . .

The reason money-losing long-distance trains continue to operate is that the economic arguments for eliminating them fails the political test. Once the good folks of a given state or city lose their once-daily, long-distance train, the congressional lawmakers representing those souls are less likely to allocate tax dollars to the NEC, which still needs those subsidies for capital expenditures. (Read more from “Yes, Amtrak Train Was Sabotaged–by Congress” HERE)

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Investigators Check Amtrak Engineer’s Cellphone Records

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Photo Credit: FlickrThe National Transportation Safety Board is combing through the cellphone records of the engineer at the controls of the crashed Amtrak train, and said he was using it the day of the deadly derailment, the agency said in a statement Wednesday.

“Although the records appear to indicate that calls were made, text messages sent, and data used on the day of the accident, investigators have not yet made a determination if there was any phone activity during the time the train was being operated,” the NTSB said.

The board will be checking the time stamps on Brandon Bostian’s phone to see if he was using it just before the crash that killed eight people and injured over 200 more.

There were no issues with the train’s signals systems at the time, the NTSB also said.

Investigators have also interviewed the engineer of the SEPTA train that came to an emergency stop when it was struck by an object. That motorman said Bostian announced on the radio, “hot track rail two” to warn him that he was about to pass the train. (Read more from “Investigators Check Amtrak Engineer’s Cellphone Records” HERE)

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