A Decade of Train-Pedestrian Fatalities: The Charleston Experience

Abstract

Although the cause of death is rarely in doubt in train-pedestrian fatalities, the manner of death is often unclear. The distinction between accident and suicide can only be made after careful evaluation of the history, scene investigation, autopsy findings, and toxicologic data. A retrospective analysis of 25 consecutive train-pedestrian fatalities investigated by our office between 1982 and 1992 is reported. The victims were predominantly healthy, young males. All but one person died at the scene. The cause of death was massive blunt trauma in 88% of the cases. In one case, the sole injury was decapitation. A tissue or blood ethanol level greater than 99 mg/dL was detected in 80% of the cases. A total of 60% of the cases involved persons likely to have been sitting or lying across the railroad tracks; all but one of these victims were intoxicated. The manner of death was determined to be accidental in 92% of our cases. Decapitation by a moving train is an injury highly suggestive of suicide. Massive blunt trauma, especially in the setting of ethanol intoxication, was highly associated with accidental death. Toxicologic analysis is essential in discriminating willful suicide from alcohol-induced incapacitation resulting in accidental death. Homicide, disguised as an accident or suicide, must be ruled out in all cases. Accurate determination of the manner of death is an important issue regarding civil litigation and dispersal of insurance benefits.

10 year evaluation of train accidents

“…[4,5,[12][13][14][15][16][17] A previous study from our region also reported a peak number of accidents during commuting hours. [18] Thirty-six cases (81%) were brought to the emergency department within 30 min.…”

“…Some intoxicated cases might be misleadingly reported as suicide, when in fact the fall may have been accidental. [1,15,18,19] Mortality and morbidity related with accidents usually correlate with MESS and Injury Severity Score (ISS). [3,13] We also found that RTS was positively correlated with mortality and morbidity.…”

“…[1,5,7,13,15,17,23,25] and intoxication is related with a mortality rate of 80%. [15] Although the frequency of alcohol intoxication was low in our study, with a rate of 4.5%, likely as a result of the low alcohol consumption in our population, among the 7 deaths, 2 of them were intoxicated (28%). Symonds [26] identified alcohol as a major risk factor, but he stated that alcohol contributed less in railway-related suicides than in non-railway related suicides.…”

Suicidal Behaviour on Subway Systems: A Review of the Epidemiology

“…It is notable that some authors of studies on railway suicide have suggested that raised blood alcohol levels of apparent suicides may suggest accidental circumstances and that mortality due to Btrain surfing,^the phenomena of young persons clinging onto the outside of moving trains for fun, is often influenced by alcohol use. 38,39 Articulation of Intent. An individual_s suicidal intent was not verifiable in many studies due to data collection techniques used by subway systems that may categorize all events involving individuals on tracks as either suicide incidents or accidents.…”

Suicide with self-contrived guillotine

“…In den letzten Jahrzehnten erschienen nur wenige Publikationen zu Suizidfällen mithilfe einer Guillotine oder guillotineähnlichen Konstruktionen, so beispielsweise von Nowak u. Seidl [8], Shorrock [18] sowie Šidlo et al [19]. Darüber hinaus sind zahlreiche andere Arten der suizidalen Dekapitation beschrieben; häu-fig unter diesen sind insbesondere Dekapitationen im Zusammenhang mit Zugü-berfahrungen [2,4,7,29] und verschiedenen Erhängungsvorgängen [5,9,10,13,15,22,24]. Ferner finden sich beispielsweise andere fahrzeugassistierte Dekapitationen [1,12,25,28], aber auch das Fallen in eine freie Schlinge [27], eine Explosion im Kopf-Hals-Bereich [17] und weitere suizidale Dekapitationsvarianten [14,21].…”