(The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published the following story by Jonathan D. Silver on its website on April 10.)
PITTSBURGH, Pa. — A woman traveling cross-country apparently leaped from a moving passenger train Tuesday night as it chugged through Pittsburgh, abandoning her two young children onboard.
The woman, Jonelle Jackson, 27, of Alpharetta, Ga., sustained only minor injuries and was released yesterday from the hospital.
Her children — son Walter Jackson, 1, and daughter Nizarae Robinson, 10 — were placed in the custody of a social services agency in Cleveland after police there met the train at the city’s Amtrak station, the next stop after Pittsburgh for the 14-car Capitol Limited running from Washington, D.C., to Sacramento, Calif.
Cleveland police are investigating Jackson for child endangerment.
Amtrak conductor Gary Grann told Cleveland police that a passenger alerted him to two children sitting alone after the train pulled away from Pittsburgh’s Pennsylvania Station, Downtown, at 11:10 p.m.
The passenger told Grann about overhearing an adult woman traveling with the children say: “You can do this. Don’t be selfish.”
Grann, the passenger and several other Amtrak employees combed the train for the woman with no success, so they contacted police.
Nizarae told police that the family got on the train in Atlanta and was on its way to California to visit relatives. When the train stopped in Pittsburgh, the girl told investigators, Jackson said she was leaving to wash a baby bottle. She didn’t come back.
“We don’t know what exactly happened with this woman,” Amtrak spokesman Dan Stessel said. “She apparently jumped.”
Amtrak police are investigating.
Stessel said it was not known how the woman exited the train, which has double-decker cars. The upstairs section is virtually impossible to escape from, since the vestibules between cars are fully enclosed by rubber seals. Each of the downstairs compartments, however, has two sets of doors that open like an elevator and lead to the outside.
“It would require some doing. You can’t really jump off the roof,” Stessel said. “Could you pry open a door while the train is in motion? I guess that’s possible.”
It was not known exactly when Jackson jumped or how fast the train was going.
She was found wandering through the parking lot of Pittsburgh Brewing Co. in Lawrenceville by two workers who called police.
She was taken to The Western Pennsylvania Hospital in Bloomfield, where she was treated for bumps, bruises and chipped front teeth. She had no broken bones or head injuries.
There, she made conflicting statements to a doctor treating her, saying that she was pushed from the train and that she leaped of her own volition.
The hospital held Jackson for a psychiatric evaluation, according to Cleveland police.
While at West Penn, a Pittsburgh police officer asked Jackson if she wanted to hurt herself.
“No, I ain’t like that,” the woman told the officer, according to Lt. Michael Scott of the East Liberty station.