(The Stuart News posted the following article by Gabriel Margasak on its website on May 13.)
JENSEN BEACH, Fla. — The man a Stuart teenager was trying to save when she was struck by a train was charged Monday in connection with the April 29 incident that led her death.
Christopher Mountcastle, 22, faces one felony count of interfering with the operation of a train. A sheriff’s spokeswoman said the investigation is continuing.
According to a sheriff’s report released Monday, Mountcastle was standing on the railroad tracks about 6:15 a.m., clapping his hands and yelling at the Florida East Coast Railway train barreling toward him at 50 mph.
Ashley Louise Henshall, 17, tried to pull him out of the train’s path, the report states. He jumped at the last second. She was hit and killed.
“I’m sorry she died man. Tragedy,” Mountcastle said as he was led to jail Monday afternoon in handcuffs, cursing at television reporters along the way.
In a blue button-down shirt and khaki shorts, he declined to comment further.
“He was just up there screwing around,” Martin County sheriff’s spokeswoman Sgt. Jenell Atlas said Monday. “Just jumping around, playing around. He was just playing around on the tracks.”
She declined to release any further details of the incident.
“We’re not done with Mr. Mountcastle,” Atlas said. “This one was especially hard. She was so young and she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was just out there trying to save him, actually.”
Henshall, who lived off Palm City Road in Stuart, was hours away from learning she would have graduated from high school when she died.
Henshall, her boyfriend, Nickolaus Sean Edwards, 21, and friends Mountcastle and his girlfriend Jennifer Young, 18, had been out together in the early morning hours, authorities had reported.
“They had been out drinking and playing pool until 5 a.m.,” Mountcastle later told detectives, according to a previous statement from Atlas.
The train’s engineer and conductor saw two people on the tracks as he approached and put the train into emergency mode.
“There is a high likelihood of derailment when a train is placed into emergency mode,” the sheriff’s report states.
Henshall was hit before the train could stop. No one on the train was injured.
Mountcastle was being held at the Martin County jail on Monday on $2,500 bail.