Woman takes her own life on train tracks Woman takes her own life on train tracks (February 20, 2004)

By Dan Stapleton

An unidentified woman shocked bystanders at the Mountain View Caltrain station Wednesday when she jumped onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train and was killed at about 3 p.m.

Eyewitnesses said she had parked her beige minivan a block away from Castro Street at West Evelyn Avenue and Wild Cherry Lane and walked on to the tracks just before the arrival of the southbound number 56 train. The incident is being treated as a suicide.

Witnesses described the woman as Caucasian, gray-haired, approximately 55 years old, 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighing130 pounds. The woman's identity is being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

This incident marks the first death on Caltrain's tracks this year. Throughout the system, Caltrain has an average of 10 to 15 fatalities from suicides and accidents each year. There has not been a train-related death in Mountain View since a May 2003 suicide near Rengstorff Avenue. However, two high school students killed themselves on the train tracks in Palo Alto within the past 18 months.

"If you walk along our rail corridors, you see two types of sign. One is 'No Trespassing,' and the other is a sign showing holding hands with the words 'There is Help,'" said Caltrain spokesperson Jayme Kunz. Caltrain has put up 400 of these signs in the past two years and works closely with suicide prevention groups to discourage people from using trains to kill themselves.

"We try to educate people about the effect it has on the train conductor and the passengers when someone uses a train as an easy way out," added Kunz. "Trains take about half a mile to stop, and when a conductor sees someone standing on the tracks he can blow his whistle all he wants, but unless they move out of the way there's a period of time when he knows the train is about to hit someone."

E-mail Dan Stapleton at dstapleton@mv-voice.com

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