NEWARK — The sixth death on New Jersey railroad tracks in less than two weeks was ruled a suicide today by the Bergen County medical examiner, the police said.
According to the New York Times, New Jersey Transit police who are investigating the death, of Zofia Ekiert, 51, of Garfield, have yet to determine why she walked the short distance from her home and lay on the westbound tracks of the Bergen line on Thursday afternoon. A spokesman, Ken Miller, said the investigation was continuing.
Ms. Ekiert’s husband, Stefan, said, however, that his wife had been in a “deep depression” for some years, one that had inexplicably intensified in the two days before her death. She was a native of Glowgow, Poland, he said, who had been in the United States for 15 years and who spoke little English.
Ms. Ekiert was the sixth person in 11 days to die on railroad tracks in New Jersey; four of the deaths were ruled suicides.
On Monday, a drug addicted Elizabeth couple committed suicide by stepping in front of a speeding Amtrak train near the North Elizabeth station on the Northeast Corridor line. The couple, in their 20’s, were said to have left their wallets on a nearby platform and to have embraced before being struck.
On May 6, a 73-year-old Glen Rock man committed suicide by walking off the Radburn station platform into the path of an eastbound train on the Bergen line.
Accidental deaths occurred on May 9 in Orange where a 60-year-old woman taking a shortcut over the train tracks was struck and killed and on May 6 in South Amboy where a 32-year-old woman who failed to heed a lowered crossing gate and walked onto a grade crossing was killed by a commuter train.
According to New Jersey Transit, Ms. Ekiert, who lived near the Garfield-Saddle Brook border, was standing near the tracks a half-mile from the Plauderville station around 5:40 p.m. Thursday and was spotted in the distance by the engineer of a westbound train traveling between Port Jervis and Hoboken. He sounded his horn to alert her to the train’s approach at more than 60 miles per hour, but when the train came closer she walked onto the tracks and lay down in its path, Mr. Miller said.
Mr. Miller said that the engineer was unable to stop in time. The accident halted train traffic on the line for about an hour.