(The following story by Paul Farhi and Kimberly Edds appeared on the Washington Post website on March 16.)
GLENDALE, Calif. — It had not been a perfect marriage, but at times it had been a good one. Juan Manuel Alvarez met Carmelita Ochoa when they were teenagers, when they were members of a community dance group. She was pregnant with another man’s child. He said he didn’t care. He loved her and her daughter — their daughter, he called her — anyway.
They dated for two years before Carmelita asked him to marry her. Their wedding in 2000 was held Nov. 2, Dia de los Muertos — the day of the dead, a traditional Mexican holiday. They had a son of their own and moved to a small, tidy house owned by Carmelita’s parents on a quiet street in Compton. Alvarez worked construction jobs to support his family. “He was very good to me,” his wife remembers.
But a year ago, something in Juan began to change. He’d hurt his arm on a job and couldn’t work. He stayed home with the children while Carmelita worked as a waitress. He was depressed, Carmelita thought. He began to slip away, she said, taking drugs, talking crazy.
A few months ago his behavior became so erratic and threatening that she threw him out of their house. She got a restraining order that prevented him from seeing his 6-year-old stepdaughter and 3-year-old son. As she told a court in her oft-misspelled petition, “Juan Alvarez has been using drugs for a very long time, and has started halusinating. He accusses me of being with other people, or recording us or him in our bedroom with hidden cameras. He also accusses me of doing porn videos with different people. He has treatened me and says that my family members have introdused me to a boyfriend, wich is made up by him. He has treatened to kill this person that dosn’t exist, and to my family members that he thinks has introduced me. He has treatened to do anything if I don’t let him see our kids.”
Was Juan Alvarez delusional, or diabolical? Did he intend to kill only himself or many others? In the aftermath of an enormous tragedy, justice will hinge on the answers.
The Crossing
A light rain fell in the predawn dark on the morning of Jan. 26 as Juan Alvarez drove his green Jeep Cherokee through Atwater Village, a neighborhood straddling the Los Angeles-Glendale line near Griffith Park. At the railroad crossing on Chevy Chase Drive, police say, he turned sharply and drove along the tracks, stopping parallel to a giant Costco store. At that point, he allegedly turned the vehicle so that its engine was positioned across the tracks. Then, police say, he waited.
From the north, a commuter train filled with people on their way to work downtown bore down on the Jeep.
Pushed from the rear by a locomotive, the train’s lead car smashed into Alvarez’s vehicle and drove it down the track. First came the boom of the collision, then a scraping, groaning, metallic rumble as the first of the passenger cars derailed, turned on its side and slid along the gravel. Then came a second collision, this one as the front car plowed into a Union Pacific locomotive parked on a siding, knocking it over.
The commuter train, Metrolink 100, came to rest jackknifed, its cars splayed across two sets of tracks. The metal exterior of the first car had been sheared open like a can hacked with a claw hammer.
Now a second commuter train entered the chaos. In a freakish bit of timing, Metrolink 901 came chugging toward the scene from the south just as the first chain-reaction collisions began. The jackknifed section of 100 clipped 901’s second car as it rolled past. This impact derailed 901’s rear two cars. Inside 901’s second car, John Phipps, who had been dozing, was thrown violently forward. He hit something hard, which tore a gash in his head and slammed him into unconsciousness.
For a few moments, an eerie silence settled over the scene. The mist fell on the crumpled cars and the people trapped and hurting within.
Then the cries of pain and shouts for help began.
The chain-reaction crash of the Metrolink trains killed 11 people and injured 180. It was the worst train wreck of any kind in America in six years, and one of the deadliest ever intentionally caused.
The dead included office workers, government administrators, a stock clerk and a cop. Julia Bennett, 44, was a clerk-typist with the Los Angeles Fire Department whose father and grandfather had been firefighters. Manuel D. Alcala, who was 51, was a maintenance worker at the county jail. A conductor on No. 100, Thomas M. Ormiston, was 58, two years away from retirement after a career with Southern Pacific, Amtrak and Metrolink.
Scott McKeown, 42, a telecommunications manager for the city of Pasadena, was a train buff who belonged to a local model-railroad club and collected train whistles. According to news accounts of the crash, one of the victims profusely thanked the people, including workers from the Costco store, who rushed to the scene to pull him from the train. Police later identified the man as McKeown, who died after being freed from the wreckage.
For law enforcement officials, the crash was both horrifying and personal. Among those killed was James Tutino, a 47-year-old Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy and father of four who was on his way to work at the Men’s Central Jail.
For a while, as he lay pinned in the wreckage, Phipps thought he would die, too. And so, in pain and isolation, he wrote one brief thought with the only instrument handy: the blood of his wounds. “I H my kids,” he scrawled on the back of a seat. “I H Leslie,” his wife’s name.
Juan Alvarez almost certainly would have died in the crash, too, had he stayed in the Jeep. But he did not. Moments before the train struck, according to Glendale police investigators, Alvarez scrambled out of the front seat and walked back to Chevy Chase Drive. From there, they say, he watched the ghastly scene unfold.
At some point, perhaps before the crash, possibly after, Alvarez found a pair of scissors and slashed his arms and chest. He walked back to his apartment a few blocks away, covered in blood. Alarmed by his injuries, his landlady called paramedics, who grew suspicious and summoned police. Alvarez was arrested as he was being treated.
The first reports said Alvarez wanted to end his life on the tracks that morning but thought better of it and fled. Glendale Police Chief Randy Adams called Alvarez “deranged” and “suicidal” at a news conference after the crash. Authorities placed Alvarez on round-the-clock watch in his cell.
And that is the version of the wreck that Juan Alvarez’s family still believes.
“He was there, and out of nowhere he basically saw a light,” says Carmelita Alvarez, who has visited her husband in jail. “Not the light from the train. He said he felt like there was a presence from God telling him to get away.”
Sitting next to her, Beto Alvarez, Juan’s cousin, adds, “It was telling him to get out. . . . He felt like somebody physically pulled him away.”
Carmelita: “He tried to move the car. But his car had a lot of mechanical problems. It got caught and wouldn’t move.”
But investigators now think differently.
Days after the crash, forensic tests revealed a dramatic new piece of evidence: the presence of gasoline on the inside and outside of Alvarez’s crushed Jeep Cherokee. Glendale police, who are leading the investigation, say they have witnesses who saw Alvarez douse the car with gas. They also say they have statements from Alvarez admitting as much.
This sheds a new light on the original suicide theory. Alvarez wasn’t trying to kill himself, says Sgt. Tom Lorenz, a police spokesman. “He may have thought about committing suicide, but his actions are not consistent with that,” he said. “When you’re contemplating suicide, would you light yourself on fire? How many people kill themselves that way? Why not lie down on the tracks? Why would you walk away and watch the train hit your car?”
The self-inflicted wounds on Alvarez’s arms and chest, he said, “weren’t life-threatening.”
Police now think Alvarez’s intention was to derail the train in the most spectacular fashion possible. The motive wasn’t necessarily murder, says Lorenz, but mayhem.
And to what possible end?
Lorenz has a ready answer: “He was trying to gain the attention of his wife. He wanted her back.”
Suicide Attempt
Looking back on it now, Alvarez’s relatives say they could see early signs of his clouded mind.
“When he was 9 years old, he would always claim there was someone else in the room,” his cousin Beto recalled. “He would say they would get in bed with him and sleep with him. He would say there was an evil spirit.”
Around the same age, he recalled, Alvarez apparently tried to kill himself by standing in the middle of a busy street, waiting for a bus to hit him. He was snatched away from the onrushing bus by his grandmother.
Beto Alvarez recalls that in the days preceding the crash, his cousin had again become distracted, unable to focus. “He was there but he really wasn’t there,” Beto said. “He would look at you but he’d look right through you. He would just stare out to nowhere.”
Juan Alvarez, now 26, grew up on Los Angeles’s predominantly Latino east side, but his heart seemed to belong to Mexico, where several members of his extended family live. Shortly after graduating from high school, he joined a local troupe called Xipe Totec, which performs traditional Aztec dances at churches and parades around Southern California and across the Southwest. Alvarez wore an elaborate costume, performing in a feathered headdress, loincloth and sandals. When their son was born, he and Carmelita gave him the middle name Nezahualcoyotl, after a 15th-century tribal poet-king.
On this morning, several weeks after the crash, Beto, Carmelita and Cynthia Alvarez (Juan’s sister) are sitting in the Studio City offices of Eric Chase, Juan Alvarez’s defense attorney. Another lawyer from the firm, Debra S. White, monitors their conversation with a reporter.
Carmelita is dressed all in black, the same color she wore on her wedding day. From time to time, she dabs her eyes with a tissue. She is distraught and exhausted. Beto twiddles his thumbs nervously.
They offer recollections and explanations, but no apologies.
Chase has conceded that Alvarez drove his car onto the tracks that morning. But he has rejected the police theory — that Alvarez was motivated by a twisted desire to reconcile with his wife — as “vicious” and “a reckless distortion of the facts.”
Instead, Chase has asserted repeatedly that Alvarez suffered from mental illness and intended to do himself in Jan. 26. Indeed, he says, Alvarez poured gasoline on himself in his effort to die.
These distinctions could be critical to Alvarez’s legal defense. The Los Angeles County district attorney has charged Alvarez with 11 counts of murder with special circumstances and one count of arson. If convicted on the murder charges, he could be sent to Death Row (prosecutors have not said whether they will seek the death penalty). He has pleaded not guilty, which leaves open the possibility of an insanity defense that would save his life. A hearing is scheduled for today.
If, in fact, Juan Alvarez had a mental illness or illnesses, it was untreated and undiagnosed. Not once, even in his declining later months, had he seen a doctor for his mental condition. What’s more, despite his family’s belief that he intended to kill himself that morning, they say Alvarez never spoke of suicide, nor did he leave a suicide note.
Alvarez’s relatives say Juan was depressed by many things — that his wife was supporting the family, that he couldn’t work, that his injured left arm remained weak and all but useless. He had undergone an operation on his injured wrist, which was held together by a surgical pin. When Alvarez ran into problems with his medical insurance, he stopped going to the doctor for the wrist. One day he pulled the pin out of it himself.
Juan used to visit his sister’s house and complain about his life. “He was taking care of the kids,” says Cynthia. “He would come to the house and stay with us. He would come over all the time and tell me he was getting bored. He told me, ‘Carmen, she’s paying for everything.’ They needed money. He was very stressed because they needed money.”
Alvarez tried rehab for a cocaine habit but dropped out twice. In her petition for a restraining order filed in November, Carmelita blamed Juan’s drug abuse for his frequent outbursts.
Beto, a supervisor with a drywall company, tried to help. When Alvarez couldn’t make his car payments, his cousin sent him money. He gave Alvarez work when he could; Alvarez was on his way to one such job in Pasadena when he drove down the tracks that morning.
It was Carmelita’s efforts to keep her family solvent — she and Cynthia worked together as waitresses — that seemed to trigger the worst in Juan late last year. “That was when he started hallucinating,” Carmelita says. “He was basically saying ‘Who is helping you? Who is helping you with the rent?’ ”
It soon became too much. Juan moved in with Beto in Monterey Park after Carmelita and Juan separated. This lasted for a few weeks until Juan moved out, on his own again. He found a place in Glendale, doing odd jobs around an apartment building in exchange for a place to live.
On the Saturday before the Wednesday crash, Juan called Carmelita once more. He wanted to see his children, he demanded. He was agitated. But Carmelita held fast, telling him the restraining order would remain in effect until Juan got his demons under control and his life in order. She offered one concession: He could speak to their 6-year-old daughter.
“He told her that he was being a little bit bad but when he got better he would take them to Chuck E. Cheese,” says Carmelita. “He loved going to Chuck E. Cheese. He was just another kid. My daughter gave me the phone and he said, ‘Thank you for letting me talk to the kids.’ He seemed happy.”
Carmelita is asked about the children — how are they responding to this? They have no idea what has happened to their father, she responds. She tells them that he’s sick or that he’s working. “I think it’s too traumatic to let them know now,” she says. “They will find out.”
She dabs her eyes again with a tissue. She is weary.
One of the hardest parts since the crash, she says, was seeing her husband in court the day he pleaded not guilty. “It was very emotional,” she says. And then she adds: “He saw me. He knew I was there.”
The obvious is left unacknowledged. Once again, Juan Alvarez had her attention.
An Inspiration
It is hard to be hopeful in the face of calamity, but there was some redemption in the crash of Jan. 26. As dreadful as the wreck was, investigators think it could have been even worse. Metrolink trains can travel as fast as 87 mph, but the ones involved in the crash were going relatively slowly.
Amid the suffering of families who lost husbands and sons, wives and daughters, there was at least one inspiring tale. John Phipps, who wrote the bloody message of love to his wife, Leslie, and children, survived the crash and a full hour in the wreckage. Doctors initially thought Phipps, an aerospace engineer, had suffered a fractured pelvis, brain damage and internal bleeding. By the next day, however, doctors revised that to four broken teeth, a groin injury and a gash to his head that required 25 stitches. He spent two days in the hospital. “I chalk it up to the power of prayer,” he said yesterday.
Phipps still isn’t sure why he chose the words he did in his note. But when a picture of his anonymous and bloody handiwork (taken by a Fire Department photographer) began zipping around the Internet, Phipps briefly became an international symbol of familial love. Acknowledging the media attention a week and a half after being hauled from the train, Phipps pointed the spotlight on his rescuers. “These guys are the ones who deserve the applause,” he said at a news conference held at a Hollywood firehouse. “All I did was lay there.” (Phipps, like several other survivors, has since retained a lawyer to look into Metrolink’s potential liability in the crash.)
Around the crash site, there are a few fading markers left. At the spotless Mission-style Glendale station, a glass-enclosed model train set sits in the long waiting room. A small plaque inside the enclosure pays tribute to a man who loved trains. “Dedicated to the Memory of Scott McKeown,” it reads, “January 26, 2005.”
At the back of the Costco store, near the point where the trains collided, the track has been repaired and the debris cleared. Floral tributes to the dead — roses and camellias and wilted gardenias and carnations — lie stacked and fading along the fence that backs to the point of impact. The ribbons on the memorials to Tom Ormiston, the train conductor, read “Beloved Friend. Your Amtrak Family” and “We love you Papa Tom.”
Just up the street, at the intersection of Chevy Chase Drive and Alger Street, is the spot where Juan Alvarez turned onto the rails one damp morning a few weeks ago. The signs guarding the intersection stand like silent sentries. They read: “Do Not Stop on Tracks.”