BUFFALO — As CSX freight train conductor Kevin McCabe leaned to look under his stopped train Thursday for a woman he thought the train had just run over, his shoulder bumped into an unexpected object: the muzzle of a rifle, according to the Buffalo News.
Then all he felt was intense pain, said McCabe, 29, of Cheektowaga, from Erie County Medical Center on Thursday night, where he was listed in fair condition.
“After I got shot, I ended up on the rocks between the tracks,” he said. “I radioed back that I got shot. I didn’t see him. I can’t even explain it. It was really horrible.”
McCabe was shot by an unknown man who police are still seeking, after he pulled his train to an emergency stop.
“Out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman running right into the side of my train,” McCabe said. “She jumped out of the weeds and started running straight into our side. It looked like she was running for her life. I thought we hit her.”
There was nothing unusual about the first leg of the trip to Willard, Ohio, 150 miles west of Cleveland, until the two-mile-long train approached the Route 5 Seneca Nation bingo hall on the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation sometime around 1:20 a.m.
The train was traveling about 40 mph, McCabe recalled.
McCabe, who has worked as a conductor for three years, immediately put the train in emergency mode – standard procedure when the conductor fears someone might have been hit.
“I went back to check to see if she was in one piece or not,” he said.
McCabe walked along the side of the 51-car train in the darkness for a half-mile or more, searching the tracks for the woman. Out of nowhere, he felt the gun in his shoulder.
“I bumped right into the gun. He had the rifle placed against my shoulder, and he pulled the trigger,” he said. “Next thing I knew, I was looking down at the stones between the tracks.”
McCabe said the shooter didn’t say a word to him. He saw him only long enough to see that the man was wearing a camouflage jacket.
After McCabe radioed back to his partner in the train, emergency crews and an ambulance arrived. McCabe said besides the gunshot wound, he suffered a collapsed lung.
He learned later that he was shot by a .22-caliber round.
“I’m a pretty big guy. I can’t believe it took me down,” he said.
Robert T. Sullivan, a spokesman for CSX, said the railroad is working closely with Erie County sheriff’s deputies and State Police.
“I honestly can’t recall anything like this happening,” Sullivan said. “The only previous shooting incidents . . . resulted in train windows being shot out, not a conductor being shot. It’s just a terrible event.”
McCabe said if more crew members were assigned to the train, the incident might have been averted. The railroad, which formerly assigned up to five members to a train, cut back to two, he said. “I was just a sitting duck in the middle of nowhere,” he said.
McCabe expects to be hospitalized for a few more days and has not decided whether he’ll return to work as a train conductor.