By all accounts, Sunday was to have been a euphoric day for Bill McCombs. Not only is it Father’s Day–which, like most holidays for the family, meant a get-together–but the McCombses were expecting lots of conversation about his daughter’s wedding next weekend on an Aspen, Colo., mountaintop.
Now, instead of a brunch or jokes about an ugly tie, Sunday will bring a funeral for the family of McCombs, one of the three victims of Thursday’s crash involving a Chicago-bound South Shore Railroad commuter train and a tractor-trailer in Portage, Ind.
The nuptials for his daughter Melinda–in the works for more than a year–have been postponed indefinitely.
McCombs of LaPorte, Ind., Glenn Walker of Michigan City, Ind., and Gary Berndt of Baroda, Mich., died early Thursday after the train slammed into the end half of the 65-foot-long truck. The truck was straddling the tracks and carrying two 20-ton steel coils. Upon impact, one of the coils snapped its rigging and plowed into the lead car of the two-car train, killing the men and causing minor injuries to six others.
On Friday, the National Transportation Safety Board and Indiana state officials continued to investigate the cause of the crash.
As grief replaced shock, loved ones of the three men grappled with how, in the blink of an eye, life could be altered so dramatically, and how the to-do list of family members somehow shifted from “pick up a Father’s Day card” to “pick out a casket.”
In LaPorte, a small town tucked into a corner of northwest Indiana, news of the crash spread quickly. Even before the victims were identified, “half the town already knew it was Bill McCombs,” said Debbie Good, an employee at Essling Funeral Home in LaPorte, where McCombs’ body was taken. “That’s how steady this guy was . . . for 11 years, you knew he was always on that train, sitting in that same seat.”
Relatives recalled the meticulous way McCombs, 57, would hang his Christmas tree lights (“not just draped, but wrapped just so around each branch”), his knack for all things mechanical (“an electrician without a license”) and his passion for agriculture (the Jaycees’ 1975 national Farmer of the Year), which he later parlayed into a successful career in commodities. But most of all, they talked about his bone-deep love of family.
“He taught his four kids a very valuable lesson called `work ethic,’ but he didn’t just work hard, he played hard too,” said D.J. Crowel, a brother-in-law of McCombs’. “He celebrated everything in a big fashion. He left his mark on everybody.”
Those sentiments were echoed by the friends of Glenn Walker, who worked for the South Shore Railroad since 1996.
The 38-year-old Michigan City man was scheduled to be off Thursday, according to Belicia Hicks of Coleman and Williams Funeral Home in Michigan City, where Walker’s body was taken. Instead, he decided to fill in for another employee.
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Bill Ashley, pastor of Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Michigan City, said: “It’s hard for me and members of the church to believe this happened. . . . This was a young man who was just getting started.”
Walker, a father of five, had logged 12 years in the U.S. Army, leaving in 1991 as a staff sergeant, and was now fully embracing civilian life. Two weeks ago, the family had moved into a new home in Michigan City.
The joyous event came on the heels of another death in the family. Around Mother’s Day, Walker’s wife, Christa, returned from her native Germany, where she had just buried her mother.
Gary Berndt, 53, was a systems engineer at United States Cellular Corp. in Chicago. But other information on the Baroda, Mich., man was not immediately available.
Meanwhile, NTSB spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz said investigators spent Friday examining the tractor-trailer as well as the commuter train’s frame, signals and brakes. Investigators also were looking into the condition of the tracks and the crossing gates at the crash site, trying to determine whether the truck driver, Keith James Lintz of Niles, Mich., drove around a dropped crossing gate and onto the tracks.
Lintz told police on Thursday that he was crossing the two sets of railroad tracks, one set operated by the South Shore and the other by Conrail, near Midwest Steel Co., 6300 U.S. Highway 12 in Portage, when the north rail crossing gate, the one protecting the Conrail tracks, lowered. He said he stopped and was waiting for the Conrail train to pass when he saw the South Shore track gates come down behind him. The two sets of gates are designed to lower simultaneously, according to South Shore officials.
Lintz, 39, said that because he was stuck between the two gates, he was unable to move his truck. As a result, he said, the South Shore train hit the second trailer of his rig, which was carrying one of the 20-ton steel coils.
At that point, according to Portage police, the coil on the trailer dislodged and rolled into the train.
Lintz was ticketed Thursday for allegedly improperly securing the coils to his trailer, exceeding the allowable gross weight load for the type of truck he was driving, being 28 days behind in his log book and having faulty brakes.
Deputy Porter County Prosecutor Michael Drenth said that after the investigations, his office may consider filing criminal charges against Lintz, who now faces $2,000 in fines for the citations.
The truck Lintz was driving is owned by Top Line Express Inc. of Lima, Ohio. The company on Friday had no comment on the accident.
The NTSB has scheduled a re-enactment of the accident for Saturday in hopes of getting a clearer picture of how it occurred. The re-enactment, scheduled for about 4:30 a.m., roughly the time the crash occurred Thursday, is standard procedure after a passenger train accident, Lopatkiewicz said.