Another Reason I Want to Learn ASL

The police officer that interpreted was invaluable to this family in their time of need.


Teen struck by train's snowplow
Reigning Miss Deaf Texas had been sending text messages to friends, parents.
By Tony Plohetski
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Shortly before 2 p.m. Monday, Tara McAvoy was walking about a foot away from Union Pacific railroad tracks in South Austin, sending a flurry of text messages from her cell phone to family and friends. Police said McAvoy, the reigning Miss Deaf Texas, typed one to her parents, both of whom are hearing-impaired, letting them know she was walking from the family's home on Waterloo Trail to her mother's workplace on Evergreen Avenue. Austin police Detective David Fugitt said McAvoy, 18, had always taken a path along Lamar Boulevard — the distance was a little more than a mile — but told her parents in the text message that she was walking along the tracks. Minutes later, the snowplow on the front of a 65-car Union Pacific train, which authorities said extended 16 inches on both sides of the tracks, struck McAvoy. She died at the scene. "As the train approached, they sounded the horn and got no response," Fugitt said. "They activated the emergency brakes but were unable to stop in time." Fugitt said he is not sure whether McAvoy would have felt vibrations from the train and said she might have been distracted. Gene Mirus, an instructor in the deaf studies department at Gallaudet University in Washington, said deaf people often have a false sense of security when walking along train tracks. "It is easy for deaf people to walk on railroad tracks under the premise that vibrations would warn them of an oncoming train," Mirus wrote in an e-mail. "Contrary to what most people think, there are no vibrations on railroad tracks." Mirus said he is working on a national campaign to educate deaf people about the dangers of walking on railroad tracks. Austin police and Union Pacific officials said Tuesday that they are continuing to investigate the accident. Union Pacific spokesman Joe Arbona said trains are equipped with devices similar to black-box recorders in airplanes to collect data that should help determine how quickly the crew began sounding its horn and trying to stop. "One of the things that is particularly painful within the context of this poor family is that the engineers actually had to witness this, knowing that when you get into a locomotive, there is no steering wheel," Arbona said. "As you can imagine, they are pretty shook up about this whole thing, too." McAvoy graduated from the Texas School for the Deaf in 2005 and won the state pageant in June. She was scheduled to compete in the national pageant in California this year. She had been a cheerleader, a basketball player and an honor roll student at the Texas School for the Deaf. Fugitt said McAvoy was walking northbound on the tracks near Oltorf Street and Thornton Road in the same direction as the train, which was hauling a fleet of cars from Mexico to St. Louis. He said the train's conductor and engineer first spotted McAvoy crossing a bridge as they rounded a bend in the tracks. They initially thought she would get out of the way and began sounding the train's horn. Arbona said the crew went into "emergency mode" and began trying to stop the 4,700-ton train. "You are looking at a pretty heavy train that would take at least a mile to stop," said Arbona, who did not know the train's speed at the time of the accident. The train struck McAvoy about 40 feet from the bridge. Taylor Schimek, the day manager at the Music Lab, a nearby recording and rehearsal studio, said he was setting up microphones and moving chairs inside a practice room when he heard the train blaring its horn. He said the train continued to block Oltorf for hours. "The train sometimes will be parked like that, and so I thought it was a regular thing," Schimek said. Fugitt said he understood from officers at the scene that McAvoy's father had planned to pick her up at her mother's office and came upon the scene. McAvoy's father communicated with a police officer who knows sign language and found out that a teen had been killed by a train. McAvoy's parents remained at the accident site and helped identify their daughter. They could not be reached for comment Tuesday. "They're having a hard time, and it's understandable," Fugitt said. "Obviously, she had a lot of family and friends, so there is certainly support there."