(BLE Editor’s Note: David R. Thews is Local Chairman of BLE Division 815 (Blue Island, Ill.) and is the BLE’s General Chairman on Metra.)
CHICAGO — In his eight years as an engineer for Metra, David Thews has seen a lot of things cross his train’s path: stray animals, rowdy teenagers, cars stuck on the rails.
Never a 2-year-old boy, though — until Monday. The sight stopped Thews in his tracks.
Thews was driving the Rock Island line toward Joliet and had just left the Robbins station heading for Midlothian about 1:15 p.m. when he saw something on the tracks.
From a quarter-mile away, Thews thought it might be an animal. He eased on the brakes and tooted the horn.
“It,” he quickly realized, was a blond-haired boy.
Thews stopped the train about 30 feet short, got out and approached the boy, who was clad in a blue jean jacket and jeans.
The boy, who had been walking with his back to the train in the center of the tracks, barely batted an eyelash, Thews said.
“I didn’t want to scare him,” he said. ” I was scared, though, I really was.”
“Choo choo,” the boy said, motioning to the engine, when Thews picked him up and boarded the train.
At the Midlothian station, Sgt. Karl Decker of the Midlothian Police Department took the boy and was helping him into a squad car when a call came in about a lost child.
Police said the boy’s parents were visiting a couple who lived next to the tracks. The women had left, and the men were in the back yard taking apart a swing set when the boy “just wandered off,” Decker said.
The boy and his parents, whose names police would not release, were quickly reunited at the friends’ home.
“It was discussed with our juvenile officer, and he said no, it wasn’t a case of blatant neglect. It was just a case of a child wandering off,” Decker said.
Thews, 43, of New Lenox was “relieved” that things worked out. Though he doesn’t have kids of his own, he said he can relate to how the parents must have felt.
“My niece got away from me once when I baby-sat her. I found her in my car, pretending to be driving. She was about 2 years old then,” he said. “That went through my mind.”
The boy’s parents have told police they want to meet Thews and thank him. Thews said he welcomes the meeting and has a Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers hat to give the boy.
“I just want to hold the kid again,” he said.
(This story appears on the Chicago Sun-Times’ website on April 2.)