(The following story by Lee Gray appeared at GoUpState.com on March 27.)
SPARTANBURG, S.C. — A University of South Carolina student was killed after falling under a train Wednesday morning in Newberry County. The train was inspected in Spartanburg later in the day.
Newberry County Chief Deputy Coroner Tommy Hedgepath identified the student as Robert Chase Campbell, 20, of 512 Hunters Lane in Anderson. Hedgepath said it appears that at about 6:30 a.m. Campbell fell under the CSX coal train he was riding on and was run over. An autopsy is scheduled for this morning, and toxicology results are pending, Hedgepath said.
An investigation by the Newberry County Sheriff’s Office revealed that Campbell and three of his friends boarded the train between 4 and 5 a.m. Wednesday as it sat stationary on the tracks near the university’s Greek Village.
A friend of theirs had jumped on a train before, and they thought it might be fun, Newberry County sheriff’s Maj. Todd Johnson said.
The men were standing between rail cars, holding onto the exterior of the train as it began moving, Johnson said.
“After the train passed through the campus area, it began to increase speed. As it did, it became more difficult to hold onto the train and began to get much colder. However, because of the increased speed of the train, the men could not get off of the train,” said Newberry Sheriff Lee Foster in a news release.
“The other three men stated that at some point they looked back and realized that the victim was no longer holding to the train,” the release stated. “When they arrived in the City of Clinton, they called friends to come pick them up and started riding along the train tracks looking for the victim. They could not locate him.”
Campbell hung onto the train for about 35 miles before falling off. His friends were on the train until it slowed down in Clinton – about 65 miles from Columbia.
Another CSX train engineer called the Newberry County 911 center just before 10 a.m. to report a body on the tracks. Hedgepath said it does not appear that the second train hit Campbell, who was found between the towns of Prosperity and Little Mountain.
Campbell’s mother, Jenny Campbell, struggled Wednesday to talk about him on the phone, saying she was “kind of numb.”
“He was a very sweet and caring child,” she told The State newspaper. “He was a great son.”
Campbell, the youngest of three brothers, was a 2006 graduate of West Side High School in Anderson, where he played on the junior varsity baseball and basketball teams.
Last spring, Campbell made the dean’s list at USC and had been thinking about pursuing a career in commercial real estate.
He and some fraternity brothers planned to rent a house in Charleston this summer, said Dustin Campbell, his 28-year-old brother.
“He just loved life,” Campbell said. “I was happy for him that he was happy, just getting out of the house, just getting to be a man, just starting to learn life.”
Foster said once the train was located, the engineer had no knowledge that the students were on the train or that Campbell had fallen off.
Maj. Dan Johnson of the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office said a local sheriff’s deputy assisted in the investigation at the Spartanburg train yard Wednesday afternoon.
According to CSX spokesman Gary Sease, the train was traveling from Hazard, Ky., to Erwin, Tenn.
“CSX and all of the nation’s railroads spend a lot of time trying to raise awareness of being around railroad property, including trains,” Sease said. “While we don’t know all of the details yet in this tragic case, we want to emphasize again that it is against the law to board a freight train.
“Trespassing on railroad property and interfering with railroad equipment can certainly have tragic consequences,” he said.
USC spokesman Russ McKinney Jr. said Campbell was a sophomore advertising major and a member of Sigma Nu fraternity.
(The State newspaper contributed to this report.)