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There was nothing Darren Brown could do to save the man who dove headfirst in front of his train.
The Brightline was traveling at 79 miles an hour when Brown, the train’s conductor, saw him. But trains don’t stop quickly. Brown told the engineer to hit the brakes, and they watched as the man disappeared under the train’s nose.
Brown can’t keep these incidents straight in his mind. But he thinks this death — of Dennis Conrad, a 67-year-old retiree in Hollywood — was his first.
READ MORE: Killer Train: Brightline death toll surpasses 180, but safeguards are still lacking
When the train stopped, Brown followed protocol. He climbed down out of the cab and laid his eyes on a grisly scene spread over several hundred yards.
After investigators questioned him, Brown resumed the train’s journey toward Miami. That’s when he heard the railroad sensor announce that a second Brightline train was approaching the fatality. All train traffic there was supposed to stop while first responders combed the tracks for body parts and personal items.
There’d been a communication breakdown. The second Brightline train “suddenly approached” at maximum speed, an official record of the incident recounted. Everyone ran for their lives.
The train ran over Conrad a second time.
Darren Brown was no rookie. Railroad work was in his family. He’d worked for Union Pacific back in Chicago. But that wasn’t this.
It was the day after Thanksgiving, 2018. Brown would see two more men die by Christmas.
Darren Brown’s experience with death might be uncommon in the world of transit, but not in the world of Brightline.
Brightline train crews confront violent deaths on a regular basis. Their experiences, their suffering, are part of the long debris trail of the nation’s deadliest major passenger rail system.
Fire, smoke, a news helicopter circling overhead, a coroner, scattered body parts, crying witnesses, screaming family members, a train full of passengers recording your every move with their phones.
It changes a person.
On any given day, the tracks — mostly unfenced and crossing over hundreds of roadways — attract all sorts of people who don’t belong there. Most of them are on foot. Most are between crossings, where there are no gates, no bells and few signs. People walking to work, or church, or headed home from the bar, cutting across the tracks. People not paying attention at all. People like this retiree, wanting to end it.
Brown got his first railroad job in Chicago when he was 19. He built muscle on the Union Pacific Railroad, pulling levers, throwing switches, assembling freight trains. Then he moved into the train cab, making good money. He had done both jobs: engineer, physically controlling the train; and conductor, overseeing everything.
Once you get out of Chicago on a freight train, miles of cornfields surround the tracks. In the city, the train is elevated and, in some locations, fenced. To hit someone is rare. It’s only happened to his father, a train engineer, four times over 35 years.
Darren and his brother both went into railroad work.
Darren liked the feeling of chugging along inside the train cab. It can be exhilarating. Blowing the horn cadence: two long, one short and one long.
He was drawn to Florida by Brightline — to be part of something exciting, a new, fast train, privately owned, luxury on wheels.
He was incredibly proud to be, as he called it, a “badass bullet train conductor.”
Brown has a celebrity spirit about him. He posts frequently on social media. In 2017, when he got the call from Brightline, he was on a reality TV show, “The Spouse House.”
He’d be moving to West Palm Beach. He’d become a father, with a boy named Force, as in “may the force be with you.” He’d be conducting the bright yellow Brightline trains as they launched in 2018 at 79 miles an hour in South Florida, and later hitting 125 miles an hour on the leg to Orlando.
Brown decided to find out how many people he had struck. He had no idea what his morbid statistic would be. He asked the people at Brightline.
“Fourteen,” he said they told him. And then there was another death. And another.
“What’s your body count?” someone on Instagram asked Brown last year. “16,” he responded, like he was providing his shirt size.
Brightline told the Miami Herald on Wednesday that its records show Brown was involved in six fatalities. The Herald/WLRN documented eight.
The son of a U.S. Marine, it strikes him that he has seen more death than some soldiers have.
If I stay here, he wondered, what will my body count be?
‘Is there something I could have done’
He looks like my brother.
Darren Brown remembers looking at the body and thinking that.
He looks like David. The thought haunted him.
Brown was conducting the Brightline when it hit cars, barely missed dogs, surprised people on foot.
People were always trying to beat the train.
When they didn’t make it across in time, body parts were collected into a bag, or sometimes, carted off on a stretcher. Brown didn’t know names, dates or even who lived and who died. He had long since lost count of how many men and women he had run over.
But this guy looked like his brother.
“I broke down.”
It wasn’t his fault. But self-doubt enveloped him after these incidents.
Was I looking down at my notebook? Could we have hit the brakes sooner?
One time, he counted how many people tried to beat the train on a single ride from West Palm Beach to Miami. There were 31 or 32 people, mostly on foot. On the way back, about 20.
Even though it’s not the train crew’s fault, he said vigilance in the train cab saves lives.
The hitting of the emergency brakes. The laying on the horn.
”If I hadn’t been paying attention, there are so many people that I’ve seen last minute, blow the horn, and they look up last minute, and then they walk the other way. ... The number of close calls is mind-blowing.”
In this together
Brown created a Facebook page to support his colleagues. He cheered their accomplishments. He reminded them that “we are a railroad family.”
They were all going through it.
When you hit someone, if you’re a conductor or engineer, Brightline offers three days off work and mental-health therapy.
Brown always said yes, but it wasn’t mandatory. He said some of his colleagues worried it would look weak and refused it.
The scenes seemed fantastical at times.
His buddy from Chicago, Vernon Mahan, was operating the train when it struck and killed a 23-year-old woman who was running from a Kmart security officer. She was accused of shoplifting.
“You don’t forget them,” Mahan said. “They bury into the depths of your brain, they do. That was a bad one.”
“You don’t forget them. They bury into the depths of your brain, they do. That was a bad one.”Vernon Mahan, former Brightline engineer.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, two men training to be engineers struck and killed a 30-year-old man riding a bicycle.
A few months later, on the day Brightline trains resumed service, a train carrying the company president struck a car, injuring a woman whose grandchild was in the back seat.
One conductor in training came around a bend in Lake Worth Beach and saw a cop with his arms stretched out — stop! The deputies were chasing an armed-robbery suspect on foot, and he ran into the train’s path. A Taser dart was still embedded in his back pocket. Because his death involved sheriff’s deputies, every train passenger had to be interviewed by law enforcement.
An acquaintance of Brown from Chicago is one of the longest-serving crew members at Brightline. Her work experience is dotted with tragedy.
She was in the cab when the train hit a mentally disabled man on his daily walk to buy a Slurpee. She was in the cab when a man in a wheelchair rolled too close to the tracks on his way to feed squirrels. She was there when the Brightline hit a Hollywood man who was walking his dog. She witnessed the train striking a high school student — one of two 17-year-olds who intentionally stepped in front of Brightline trains.
Outside the cab, the dead are often scattered across an expanse of gravel, dirt and grass. One person’s death was described by the medical examiner as “total body destruction.” First responders have to pick up the pieces: a pink sandal, a green wallet, a gold bracelet.
“Not many folks think about what the crew goes through,” one rail worker posted on social media beneath a story about a Brightline fatality. “Those of us who have worked in the cab know that feeling of helplessness. You know you’re going to hit someone and there’s not a damn thing you can do but pray they get off the track before getting hit.”
It’s not uncommon for crews to make direct eye contact with the person they’re about to hit.
The mother of the first person killed by a Brightline train, 18-year -old Madison “Maddie” Brunelle, felt awful about it and wrote a letter to Brightline.
“Basically just like how horrible I felt for the train engineer,” Amy Brunelle said. “I remember what the police report says. He said she looked at him. ... How does he ever get over that?”
And where do you work?
Brown used to wear his Brightline gear everywhere.
He jumped eagerly into Brightline discussions. He was an expert. He wanted to share.
One night, he was at Roxy’s Pub in West Palm Beach.
Brightline killed my relative, someone said, describing where, and when.
That was Brown’s train. He knew it, 100%. He kept his mouth shut.
People had started cracking jokes about Brightline.
“Oh, yeah, the murder train? The death train?”
When he was off work, he knew he had to watch himself, especially on days his train struck someone. It would be easy to drink too much, to lash out.
People weren’t going to cut you slack when life outside of work got tough. They had no idea what a bad day at Brightline looks like.
He saw co-workers drinking more. Or starting to smoke. He caught himself hitting the brakes in his car on Interstate 95, skittish when he saw lights that triggered memories from the track.
An on-board worker who asked not to be identified told reporters he wears street clothes to the station. Only then does he put his uniform on. He doesn’t want to be teased again about working for “that killer train,” he said.
He is still glad to have the job. But he said it’s difficult showing up to work the day after a crash as if nothing happened.
“We go through a lot. When we go through incidents, it’s not easy. It takes a toll on everybody. We have to talk to customers. We have to explain to them, and sometimes, they yell and scream, and sometimes, they want to fight us, like we’re the problem.”
Sometimes, train attendants cry, or even leave the job, he said.
The head of the Transport Workers Union, John Samuelsen, said a key reason Brightline train attendants unionized was the fear they’d be penalized if they take time off after tragic events to tend to their mental health.
“The amount of fatalities [is] off the charts,” Samuelsen said. “It’s really, it’s unimaginable.”
If an on-board worker “wanted to go see a doctor or engage in some type of post-accident therapy in the days after there’s a massive crash with fatalities on Brightline,” they’re worried they could be disciplined for taking time off of work, Samuelsen said.
He likened the culture to that of an old-time company town.
“Brightline is like the God of everybody’s world, and if Brightline goes under, everybody’s going to suffer for it,” Samuelsen said. “And Brightline should be the focus of everybody’s life — not your children, not your family — it’s Brightline.”
A Brightline spokesperson on Wednesday said “any teammate involved in an incident” is offered mental health services.
“Brightline is fully committed to the safety and well-being of train crews and operates in compliance with all federal laws and regulations governing rail operations. Our locomotive engineers & conductors are the backbone of our service, and we go above and beyond federal requirements in supporting them with compassionate assistance and stress management options, including relief days.”
Memory lane
After a while, riding the corridor for Brown was like taking a tour through a cemetery. Memorials, flowers, stuffed animals.
They died Thanksgiving week, Christmas Eve, New Year’s Day. They died on Sunrise Boulevard, Atlantic Avenue, Lincoln Street. Bad memories, everywhere.
In August, Brown walked into the West Palm Beach Brightline station, where he was welcomed with hugs and daps. He climbed aboard the lux Brightline train with a Miami Herald reporter. As the train rolled south from West Palm Beach, a spark:
“We hit a lady right here! We hit a lady right here in front of, in front of a wedding party!”
Brown remembers striking an empty car and watching it fly into a Burger King as people ate their french fries. He has a vision of a sober home emptying out — all the occupants descending on the tracks after one of their roommates was struck.
He thinks about a collision with a woman’s car. A rabbi who was driving by on Dixie Highway stopped and ran to the wreckage. He held the woman’s hand and prayed as she wailed, “Don’t let me die! Don’t let me die!”
Did she die? Brown doesn’t even know.
His train struck a 60-year-old man in Pompano Beach — at 76 miles an hour. The man had just asked a stranger for money to get somewhere.
“I have a soft touch,” witness Peter Bungo said. “I gave him what he wanted and told him to have a good day.”
Bungo heard the train’s horn and has a lasting vision of the man’s red baseball cap flying “way up in the air.” Investigators found the dollar near his body.
Brown remembers three collisions, three Thursdays in a row. He knows that almost every Thanksgiving week, someone gets hit.
Kimberly Haase. She was 40, with a husband and daughter at home. Haase had a canker sore and became convinced she had oral cancer.
On a sunny morning two days before Thanksgiving in 2021, she walked under the Atlantic Avenue guardrails in Delray Beach as witnesses shouted to her that a train was coming. Haase stopped on the tracks and turned her back to the train.
Brown told police he hit the emergency brake, but the train traveled another 840 feet before coming to a stop. The windshield was so blanketed in blood, he couldn’t see out.
How much more of this could he take?
He started thinking about how it could be different. A person can’t just waltz onto a highway like this.
“It’s too easy to just walk onto the tracks,” he said.
A sense of indignation gnawed at him.
The way Brightline publicly referred to the dead people as “trespassers.” The way it treated every fatality the same way, as if the impact on the train crew never changed, no matter how many deaths they witnessed.
Brightline had been good to Darren Brown. But he couldn’t see out. He couldn’t see forward.
He’d seen dozens of new train nose cones in the warehouse. He knew what that meant.
“I don’t think you can stop the fatalities,” he said. “I think we can slow them down. And I think the question that begs to be asked is, ‘Are we doing absolutely everything we can?’”
Brown was having nightmares. He was depressed, anxious, he avoided driving or even riding in cars because he felt so jumpy. He was irritable, bothered by disturbing memories.
In October 2023, when Brown was 35, Brightline’s therapist diagnosed him with chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“Client has experienced multiple critical incidents at work, including observing trespassers complete suicide, as well as serious collisions with cars,” the report read. “The accumulation has begun taking its toll on his psychological state.”
Three days after the diagnosis, Brown posted on Facebook: “You are not your job.”
And then, he quit.
People with PTSD are in a constant fight-or-flight mode, said Dr. Clara Lora Ospina, director of Jackson Health System’s Adult Psychology Service.
“What that means is your nervous system is consistently aroused, your muscles are consistently tight. You withdraw. You start seeing danger everywhere.”
Ospina did not treat Brown, but said PTSD is not uncommon among first responders, veterans, people who witness death.
You can get depressed, as Brown did. You can lose the ability to enjoy life. In your mind, she said, you might hear an “internal soundtrack of negativity.”
People can heal from PTSD; they can learn how to cope.
Brown’s therapist set goals for him. “Client will achieve understanding of traumatic events and greater acceptance of self.”
After a brief time at Tri-Rail and as a rail-safety trainer, he left railroad work entirely and focused on his work as a sports and entertainment agent.
In March, he posted the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley on his Facebook page.
“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
He started speaking out about his experience. It felt good. He appeared on “Inside Edition” after journalists there read the first Miami Herald/WLRN investigation of Brightline this year.
“The outpouring of love and support for me in the comments section is insane,” he said.
Brightline has not been found at fault for any of the 191 deaths, but Brown said it’s time to “move past whose fault it was.”
“It’s not just about fences and bells and whistles. The picture is bigger than that. Someone who’s gonna walk in front of the train is gonna walk in front of the train.
“How do you care for everyone else?”
How this story was reported
Darren Brown contacted the Miami Herald after reading the Killer Train investigative story in July. We then sought public records to document what he told us — that he had been involved in 16 fatalities as a Brightline conductor. We submitted questions about Brown to Brightline in August and October. We obtained police incident reports or other official documents from more than a dozen agencies for all 113 Brightline fatalities that occurred during the years Brown worked there. At times, the Herald had to engage an attorney to help us obtain these public records. Of the 94 reports we received, eight identified Brown as the conductor. Some reports don’t identify the conductor, and two agencies failed to produce the public records: The Broward Sheriff’s Office, which holds 14 of the reports, and Fort Lauderdale Police Department, which has five. Reporters also reviewed Brown’s mental-health documentation, a 15-page diagnostic report written by Brightline’s therapist. Descriptions of other conductors’ experiences come from police reports. The Herald interviewed Brown on five occasions, starting in July, and rode the Brightline with him.
Killer Train Series Credits
WLRN
Danny Rivero | Reporter
Joshua Ceballos | Reporter
Jessica Bakeman | Editor
Sergio R. Bustos | Editor
Denise Royal | Editor
Merritt Jacob | Audio Engineer
Mihail Halatchev | Digital Production
Matheus Sanchez | Digital Editor
Alyssa Ramos | Digital Engagement
Valentina Sandoval | Digital Engagement
Miami Herald
Brittany Wallman | Investigative Reporter
Susan Merriam | Data & Visual Journalist
Shradha Dinesh | Data Journalist
Matias J. Ocner | Photo Journalist
Aaron Leibowitz | Reporter
Allison Beck | Reporter
Carolina Zamora | Audience & Engagement
Kevin Scott | Audience & Engagement
Adrian Ruhi | Audience & Engagement
David Santiago | Photo Editor
John Parkhurst | Copy Editor
Jessica Lipscomb | City Editor
Trish Wilson Belli | Investigations Editor
The Fund for Investigative Journalism provided support for this series.
