Death on the tracks

FEDOR ZARKHIN/PALM BEACH POST

By all accounts, Leonor Cuervo was not suicidal. Her husband and daughters can only guess why she was hit by a train a few hundred feet from her Boca Raton home.

But the fact that the Colombia native was crossing the Florida East Coast Railway tracks in the first place is something the company could have prevented, asserts her daughter, Andrea. No fence or signs stopped her as she followed a makeshift footpath across the tracks to get from a bus stop to her home.

Of 61 deaths on all train tracks in Palm Beach County since 2008, 47 were pedestrians, a Palm Beach Post analysis of medical examiner reports shows. A quarter of the state’s reported pedestrian rail deaths in 2011, 2012 and 2013 were in Palm Beach County. Continue reading…