(The following story by John M. Guilfoil appeared on the Boston Globe website on March 7, 2009. Walter Nutter is a member of BLET Division 57 in Boston, Mass.)
BOSTON — On an autumn night in 2000, Walter Nutter was at the controls of the No. 577 Commuter Rail train in Natick, when he came around a hairpin curve to see the back of a blond woman’s head as she stood in the middle of the track. Not the emergency brake, the piercing train whistle, or the engineer’s terrified scream could prevent what happened next. Someone committed suicide using his train. It was the third time Nutter had to watch his train hit a person.
“She never even flinched,” Nutter, 57, recalled in a recent interview. “She just stood there until we hit her. It’s horrifying to imagine somebody doing that. I don’t know if there’s any way to prepare somebody for that.”
That may be true, but transit officials are now working on ways to offer what comfort they can to these unseen victims, engineers, and conductors who unwittingly play a role in a stranger’s death, something that happens about once a month on local rail lines, according to transit officials. The MBTA and the private company that operates its commuter rail system, the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Co., are teaming with Samaritans, a nonprofit organization, to counsel rail workers who must come to grips with suicide and death on the tracks.
In recent months, Samaritans began offering its counseling services, including a 24-hour confidential hot line, to conductors and engineers who have witnessed a suicide. The nonprofit is conducting workshops with new rail engineers who are likely at some point to confront a scene similar to what Nutter saw on that October night.
Reports show that three people have killed themselves on railroad tracks this year, including two people who died in separate occurrences within eight hours of each other just last week. On Thursday about 11:30 p.m., a man was struck and killed by an outbound Red Line train at Savin Hill Station. Then, at 7 a.m. Friday, an elderly man walking on the tracks in Belmont was killed by a commuter train. Both deaths appeared to be suicides, according to an official with knowledge of the investigations.
Since 2006, at least 20 people have used commuter or T trains to kill themselves, according to the MBTA.
The issue of suicide on the tracks has largely gone under the radar. The federal government did not differentiate between suicides and accidents until last year. From 2004 to 2007, 1,910 people standing on railroad tracks have been struck and killed by trains. That figure does not include people in vehicles that are hit.
Nutter estimated that on average, engineers hit two to three people during the course of their careers.
“I think it’s a big problem, and this is a program that has been sorely needed for a long time, allowing people to know about and seek help at that very moment when they’re making a decision,” said Richard Davey, general manager of the commuter rail company.
The MBTA and the commuter rail company provided space to Samaritans to advertise the group’s suicide prevention services at commuter rail and subway stations, which they began posting in November. It is an attempt to educate the public about suicide and to reach out to anyone who might be thinking about stepping in front of a train.
“What we’re trying to do here is make every effort we can to reach out to that desperate person at the most desperate moment by trying to get some signs up where hopefully we can get that person in that last moment to say, ‘Call someone who can help you,’ ” said Daniel A. Grabauskas, MBTA general manager. “We’re trying to see if there’s some way to get to people who might be thinking these kinds of thoughts.”
The occurrences leave engineers and crew with painful memories that can stick with them for the rest of their lives.
“One employee held a person in their arms while they passed,” Davey said. “It can be a very traumatic experience for even the toughest among us. It can be a very sobering moment to witness someone make the choice to take their lives.”
Grabauskas said he has talked with crew members immediately after a suicide on the tracks and has seen the effects on them.
“It’s a sad situation,” he said. “It’s not one that they caused, and yet they’re the ones who were operating the train. It’s hard to disassociate yourself from it . . . but this was not their fault.”
People have killed themselves on tracks as long as there have been trains. Even transit officials say there is no way to prevent a person from turning a train into an instrument of death.
“There are hundreds of miles of train tracks, and there’s almost nothing we can do when somebody in a subway station at the last moment makes that decision to get in front of a train,” Grabauskas said.
In one case, Davey recalled, a person hid behind a signal box until a train came and jumped in front of it. There was no warning and no chance for the engineer to stop the train.
Nutter is also part of a program under the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, he said, where he and other experienced engineers who have had to deal with death on the tracks talk to engineers who have experienced a suicide.
“We just talk and try to help them deal with it,” Nutter said.
The Samaritans held their first workshop for a class of new rail engineers in December.
Roberta Hurtig, executive director of Samaritans, said that the group is not only working to educate the rail employees on the issue of suicide, but also provide them with support if they are involved with a suicide.
They can “call our confidential, free help line anytime they want to talk and/or receive emotional support,” Hurtig said.
Samaritans is an international organization founded in the United Kingdom in 1953. Samaritans of Boston was formed in 1974 and merged with a Framingham group in 2005 to become a statewide nonprofit agency. It says it is the only suicide prevention organization for Greater Boston.
Samaritans’s mission is to provide relief from isolation, despair, and suicidal feelings among people in the community by education, compassion, and a 24-hour, confidential help line, 877-870-HOPE.
Said Hurtig, “If someone is at risk, anything that might interrupt feelings of suicide and/or create a ray of hope might save lives.”