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Marie Mevil didn’t think twice about driving over the train tracks.
Her Pompano Beach home was less than 10 minutes away. She had dropped her daughter off at the airport and then stopped to send money to a friend in her native Haiti. Her 1-year-old grandson, Carson, was nestled in his car seat.
She was about to cross over the railroad tracks at Northeast Third Street and North Dixie Highway when the car in front of her stopped for a red light. A railroad crossing arm came down with a thud on top of her Nissan Rogue before she even realized a train was speeding toward her.
She was trapped.
The 71-year-old nurse’s aide drove forward and tried to make a U-turn off the tracks to escape when a Brightline train blasted through the back half of her car.
Since Brightline launched in 2018, its trains have hit 174 vehicles, killing 25 people and injuring 63 more, an investigation by the Miami Herald and South Florida NPR member station WLRN found.
Another 104 people survived without injuries, some by fleeing their cars before impact.
It happens with alarming regularity. During rush hour Wednesday evening, a Brightline train in North Miami struck a car at Northeast 141st Street. One victim was airlifted to a nearby trauma center.
In July, the reporting team found that Brightline is the nation’s deadliest major passenger railroad. At the time, its death toll was 182, a number that includes both drivers and pedestrians. Its fatality count has since reached 194.
When Mevil regained consciousness, her driver’s door was stuck, its frame warped in the collision. Something was wrong with her leg. Her chest burned where the seatbelt had bitten into her skin. It took all of her strength to kick open the door, and witnesses stared as she climbed out of the vehicle.
The car was severed at the back wheel. A tangle of metal, plastic and wire converged on the place where the baby’s car seat was supposed to be.
“Please help me!” she called out in a mix of English and Haitian Creole. “My grandson is in the back!”
Two men pulled Carson free of the wreckage. The baby seemed unharmed, and despite her broken collarbone, Mevil held him close as the crowd waited for police and EMS to arrive.
It was Nov. 8, 2021, and the luxury higher-speed train that hit Mevil was on its first journey after a 19-month pandemic hiatus. Brightline’s then-president Patrick Goddard had boarded it earlier that morning in Miami, bound for a press conference and celebration in West Palm Beach.
To witnesses, the baby’s survival was miraculous. But Brightline officials, who have consistently blamed victims for trespassing on the railroad tracks, focused on the grandmother.
“Today, we had a tragic reminder of what can happen in spite of grade crossings operating as they should and our team operating as it should,” Goddard said at a press conference. “This was an accident that was completely avoidable.”
“Don’t try to beat the train. That is the message.”
It had happened before.
The Northeast Third Street crossing in Pompano Beach had seen two crashes before Mevil’s — one in which a driver went around the gates and was killed, and another when a vehicle stopped on the tracks, injuring its three occupants.
“They made it seem like it was her fault,” said Mevil’s daughter, Caroline Trimmings, whose son was in the SUV. “They made it seem like she should have been more cautious.”
“My mom definitely wouldn’t, you know, run through a train or do something foolish.”
When Mevil talks about the collision’s aftermath, she runs shaking fingers over a long scar that peeks out from the collar of her dress — a mark from the seatbelt that likely saved her life.
Police handed her a citation for trespassing on the train tracks while she was still in her hospital bed. Her daughter translated. Long proud of her pristine driving record, Mevil decided to fight it.
In March 2022, an attorney from The Ticket Clinic appeared in Broward County traffic court on Mevil’s behalf. A judge dismissed the charges, which left no points on her license.
Mevil felt vindicated.
“Me no block nobody, no kill nobody. The case closed.”
Trapped on the tracks
Rosa Chacon wishes she’d listened to her husband.
It was the summer of 2019. Chacon’s husband was researching insurance options, but Chacon told him she was healthy and didn’t need the coverage.
Then, on her drive to work one morning, Chacon made a wrong turn. It led her to a North Miami railroad crossing she hadn’t gone through before.
The tracks run in front of a Lexus dealership and a large apartment building, where residents walk across the tracks to get to nearby grocery stores.
In 2014, Federal Railroad Administration officials recommended North Miami close the crossing, which intersects Northeast 141st Street near Biscayne Boulevard — the same site as Wednesday’s accident and one of the area’s busiest thoroughfares.
City officials declined. Other safety measures, like flexible barriers, road markings and suicide prevention signs, weren’t added either.
In 2018, a 26-year-old woman was struck from behind and killed by a Brightline train at the intersection.
Chacon didn’t know any of that as she pulled forward.
Like Mevil, she was driving through a railroad crossing when the car in front of her stopped.
Like Mevil, she heard a noise as the gate hit the top of her SUV.
“Everything was so fast,” Chacon told reporters in Spanish. “When I realized what was happening, the train was already there.”
She remembers seeing the headlights, then nothing. She was in shock when rescue crews arrived, and she insisted that she wasn’t going to the hospital, that she was going to work.
Within minutes, the pain hit.
“Everything, everything, everything hurt,” Chacon said. “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get up.”
Chacon spent a few days in Aventura Hospital, where she recovered — at least, that’s what she told her doctors.
Her hospital bill added up to about $60,000, she said, and the North Miami Police Department added another $80 in the form of a traffic ticket for stopping on the tracks.
“I couldn’t bear the pain, but I told the doctor that I wanted to go and that I felt fine,” Chacon said. “It wasn’t that I actually felt fine, but I was thinking about what I’d have to pay the hospital.”
She returned to her work as a tailor the following week.
The bill — which Chacon said she and her husband are still paying in installments — isn’t the only thing that has followed her since the accident.
“Wounds on your body disappear slowly over time,” Chacon said. “But wounds on the inside? Those you keep.”
“When I’m waiting in traffic behind a bus, and the bus lights up at each stop, I think it’s the train lights,” she said. “I have to drive over the tracks every day because there’s no other way to get to work. There are tracks everywhere.”
‘The safest crossing is one that doesn’t exist’
As of August, the North Miami intersection where Chacon was hit had the second-highest number of Brightline collisions on the corridor — out of over 300 street-level crossings between Miami and Orlando, the Herald/WLRN team’s analysis found.
The combination of street-level crossings, quiet zones, vehicle traffic and the train’s high speed help account for Brightline’s astonishing fatality rate — one person killed every 13 days of service, on average.
Ian Savage, a Northwestern University economist and rail safety expert, said some flaws were baked into Brightline’s system more than a century ago.
Oil magnate Henry Flagler recognized Florida’s potential as a travel destination in the 1880s and built the Florida East Coast Railway to bring wealthy vacationers to his hotels and resorts across the state.
U.S. 1 came several decades later and was built parallel to the railway. As cars replaced train travel, the highway widened, inching closer to the tracks.
Then came Brightline, which saw an opportunity to serve commuters and tourists — while saving billions of dollars in costs by using the FEC tracks that were already there. Instead of constructing an elevated platform separating the train from traffic, a concept known as “grade separation,” Brightline trains would run at street level through more than 300 crossings, often in dense urban areas.
The train launched even though Federal Railroad Administration data showed how dangerous the crossings could be.
“Good people can get put in bad situations by bad road design,” Savage said. “We put railings in so people don’t fall off of balconies and things like that.”
Brightline executives have repeatedly stated that the company has abided by all safety regulations, that it has invested money into safety improvements and public awareness campaigns, and that Brightline has never been found at fault for an accident involving its trains.
“The train is safe, the railroad is safe, and Brightline operations have proven to be safe,” Michael Lefevre, Brightline’s vice president of operations, wrote in a statement to the Herald in July. “Where safety has been an issue is the way in which the community interacts with the railroad tracks.”
But local research indicates that engineered solutions are more effective than public awareness campaigns. In 2024, planners in Broward County examined whether the FEC tracks could take on a commuter rail service, examining best practices and the corridor’s history.
“The safest highway-rail grade crossing is the one that does not exist,” the authors wrote in a 477-page analysis. “Therefore, the most effective method of reducing accidents at crossings is to either close them or grade separate them. However, this approach involves the highest construction cost, and is the most disruptive to the community.”
As an alternative, the analysis included 19 different strategies for making crossings safer.
It shows that public awareness and enforcement programs are two to three times less effective than engineering solutions like lane delineators or vehicle sensors that could open gates if a car is trapped on the tracks.
“It’s the difference between telling your kid not to stick a fork in the electrical outlet — and childproofing it,” said Paul Calvaresi, who is part of the Broward Metropolitan Planning Organization team that wrote the report.
The worst-case scenario
There were only two safety arms at the W.H. Jackson Street crossing in Melbourne, Florida, which made it easier for risk-taking drivers familiar with slow-moving freight trains to dodge the flashing lights and cross to the other side.
For decades, Florida East Coast Railway trains had passed through the densely populated area of Central Florida’s Space Coast largely without incident. According to a report from the National Transportation Safety Board, there were just three crashes there between 1981 and 2006.
After Brightline began running on the same corridor, three people have died at the crossing and three more were seriously injured.
On Jan. 10, 2024, Terrica Culbreth was walking with her 9-year-old son along U.S. 1 when two friends offered them a ride home.
Keisha Gonzalez got out of the car to give Culbreth a hug. The two had met through Gonzalez’s time busking with her partner, Charles “Chuckie” Phillips. He stayed in the driver’s seat as Culbreth’s son climbed in behind him, followed by Culbreth herself.
Less than five minutes later, the car approached the W.H. Jackson Street railroad crossing.
“When I seen the train, I told him not to go. I yelled not to go,” Culbreth later told investigators. “I don’t know why he went.”
Phillips stepped on the gas.
According to a report from the Melbourne Police Department, a Brightline train was heading northbound to Orlando as Phillips’ bright orange Honda Element approached the crossing. The alarms blared, and the two gate arms went down like they were supposed to.
Culbreth described Phillips looking at her, then at Gonzalez, then continuing forward, switching lanes to pass a stopped car and the lowered gate.
“I said to myself, ‘Please don’t let there be any blood. Don’t let nobody be hurt,’” Gonzalez recalled.
She doesn’t remember much of what happened afterward.
Surveillance video from a nearby business shows the impact — the SUV striking the first car of the Brightline, then the train dragging the Honda along the tracks, flipping the vehicle into an embankment.
Phillips was declared dead at the scene. His toxicology report shows that he had both THC and a synthetic drug known as “bath salts” in his blood. The stimulant is known to cause bizarre behavior and aggression.
His three passengers were hospitalized for days. None, including Culbreth’s son, were wearing seatbelts, according to the police report.
Gonzalez learned about her partner’s death in the hospital.
“When they came in and told me he was dead, I cried,” Gonzalez said. “I think you could probably hear me through the whole hospital. I just couldn’t believe that he was gone.”
“He was my heartbeat.”
Two days later, another couple drove around the safety gates and onto the tracks. Both were killed.
The National Transportation Safety Board opened an inquiry and found that all of the lights and safety gates were operational at the time of the collision with Phillips’ Honda and that he had a history of driving with a suspended license.
Documents from the investigation also show that the number of trains on the Melbourne tracks tripled after 2023 — a key factor in what experts call exposure, which is calculated by multiplying the average daily vehicle traffic at a crossing by the number of trains that pass by.
Following the crashes, Brightline and the city installed bright yellow poles and four-way gates at the crossing. Brightline also added red-light cameras.
Since then, no injuries or fatalities have been reported at the W.H. Jackson intersection.
Shradha Dinesh, Susan Merriam and Brittany Wallman contributed reporting to this story.
Anyone who is experiencing suicidal thoughts should contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (988) or Crisis Text Line (text “HELLO” to 741741) for immediate support. Regular check-ins with primary care physicians and clergy members, who often have insights into community resources, can also be beneficial.
How the Miami Herald and WLRN found Brightline’s death toll
A team of reporters from the Miami Herald and WLRN spent over a year documenting every death involving Brightline trains since the rail line’s launch seven years ago. Drawing on autopsy reports and local law enforcement records, reporters discovered that 194 people — so far — have been killed by the fast-speed train.
The team of reporters analyzed federal railroad data, reviewed federal safety studies, consulted experts and reviewed hundreds of pages of medical examiner and police incident reports to better understand the factors that contributed to each death and to compare Brightline’s safety record against other railroads nationwide.
Read the full methodology here.
Note
Crash reconstruction illustrations used in this story were drawn based on police reports, available surveillance footage and interviews with witnesses. The illustrations are not drawn to scale.
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
David Newcomb | Director of Editorial Project Experiences
Matias J. Ocner | Photo Journalist
Aaron Leibowitz | Reporter
Allison Beck | Intern, Ida B. Wells Society
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.
