What seems to strike a personal chord with those familiar with the Blue Line is that many of those who lost their lives or were hit by the train were engaged in commonplace comings and goings.
They were rushing to catch a train. Or hurrying off a platform at the end of a trip, thinking about home. Or they were walking in a daze, perhaps with a little too much liquor in them. A 13-year-old boy lost his life running after a ball.
Masses are still said for Rosa Cebellos, a 66-year-old woman who was the Blue Line's first fatality, at St. Lawrence Brindisi, a Roman Catholic church in Watts a block from the Blue Line tracks.
Cebellos was on her way to Mass, clutching a prayer book, when she was hit by a train.
Wajeha Bilal, a community activist who works out of a small office in the historic Watts train station at 103rd Street, gets so agitated that she often rushes out to the tracks and pulls people back because they are standing too close to the tracks.
Bilal, part of the Watts economic development effort, said she has been pleading for years with the MTA to have a crossing guard stationed at the intersection to hold back the human tide that surges down 103rd every day.
"We need a crossing guard here very bad. They said they had no budget for it," said Bilal, standing a few feet from where Troy Young was hit last June.
As if to make her case, elementary-age children, just released from some of the four schools in the area, pour into the 103rd Street corridor.
"You kids, get off those tracks!" she shouts, seeing some of the children scampering along the tracks, playfully picking up stones from the roadbed or trying to balance themselves on the rails.
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Danger on the Tracks
Metro Blue Line accidents consistently cause more injuries than California's other light-rail systems.
Train accident deaths 1994-98
Los Angeles: 20
Sacramento: 1
San Diego: 11
San Francisco: 3*
Santa Clara: 1
* 1994-96 data not available
Train accidents per 100,000 miles
Los Angeles: 1.9
Sacramento: 1.5
San Diego: 1
San Francisco: 0.9
Santa Clara: 1.4
