I’m going to spare you all my typical book-length rant. I addressed the issue about the new, scaled-back Christmas tree earlier this week; I’ll miss the big one, but if a single tree is what the city can afford and is the wisest use of taxpayers’ money, so be it. If free rides for seniors are taken away, the CTA and/or Springfield legislators should expect some angry and vociferous protests; taking rights, privileges or programs away once they’re granted tends to prove unpopular. And while I can understand why he wants to wear Nikes, Marcus Jordan is not entitled to wear a different shoe on the basketball court than everyone else just because of who his father is.
That leaves this tragic and bizarre story about the22-month-old baby girl who was thrown onto the track beds at the Morse Avenue Red Line ‘L’ stop when a train’s doors closed on her stroller. Only now, the question is, how much of the story is really true?
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, on Monday evening around 6:30 p.m., the mother was trying to board a train at the Morse stop with the stroller, when the door closed on the stroller with the baby in it. Then the train began moving while the mother was still on the platform, and the baby hit her head several times on the platform before being thrown into the gravel track beds. She was rescued and taken to Children’s Memorial Hospital, and the train operator wasn’t made aware of what happened until arriving at the Berwyn station 2 miles away.
Now the motorman is suspended without pay. And
the Amalgamated Transit Union is casting doubt on the entire story, particularly the fact that a stroller was found in remarkably good condition after being dragged by an ‘L’ train and crashing into metal bars.
Now, it seems to me that the basic story of the girl being hurled from the train has enough witnesses to add up. There was the couple who helped rescue the little girl from the train tracks, and other witnesses. For the whole story to be fabricated, these people would all have to be in on a conspiracy, and so, presumably, would several doctors and nurses at Children’s Memorial Hospital. So while I don't know for sure what happened -- I wasn't there -- I think we can take the story at face value.
But as for the stroller, I can see why Transit Union President Robert Kelly is casting doubt on the stories that have been circulating. What exactly happened isn’t even fully clear; originally, the story seemed to be that the stroller remained wedged in the door of the train all the way to the Berwyn stop. Frankly, that’s next to impossible. The stroller would have been banging against the support columns at every station between Morse and Berwyn – a total of four – and would have been mangled and wrecked by the end of the trip. Furthermore, this accident didn’t happen in the dead of night when only a few drunks, stoners and untreated mental patients are on the train. It was at 6:30 p.m., and sooner or later – make that at the very next stop – someone would have noticed the stroller, if only to kick it out of the way while boarding the train.
Well, I don't know if the story was just vague at the beginning or if I got it wrong, but now it sounds like no one was really saying the stroller was wedged in the train doors for two miles; the train operator merely says she wasn’t notified of the incident with the baby until she arrived at the Berwyn stop. She says she searched the train cars for someone stuck in the doors at the Loyola stop, and didn’t realize she was supposed to be looking in the stroller. Rather, she saw kids playing with one and just removed it at the Granville stop, two stops away from the starting point.
So what’s the truth about all this? I don’t know. There will be a complete investigation, and once it’s over, I’d like to hear the complete story. And while I think it’s appropriate for some kind of action to be taken against the train operator, suspending her without pay does seem kind of harsh when we still don’t know for sure what happened.
Here is Kristyn Hartman’s story about the CTA stroller incident, and the doubts that have been raised about it:
