"He was pleading with me to help him," Thiele said. "I tried my damnedest to get him out but I just couldn't."
Nearby, a woman with a serious head injury was trying to crawl through the wreckage. Thiele had received first-aid training this week at work; he urged the woman to stay put and placed her purse under her head as a pillow.
Across the train car, through the darkness, a scream: the fire was spreading. Thiele turned back to the pinned man. "Don't worry," he told him. "I'll stay with you as long as I can."
Soon, the first firefighter peered inside. Help was heading toward the wreckage from every direction now, through the back of a residential cul-de-sac, running down bridle paths used by local families that board horses. The passengers who could move on their own were clawing their way to safety.
"People were climbing out of the side, bleeding, crying, screaming," said Katharina Feldman, who was working out of her nearby home office and raced to the scene with bottles of water after calling 911. "It was like a war zone."
Firefighters assigned her to a man whose head was gashed. The man asked her to call his wife; she did, while holding his IV.
Around them, the wounded came spilling out like ants in a rainstorm. Feldman spoke with a dazed woman in her 70s; she had broken her teeth and was having chest pains. Arnie Peterson was sitting on the ground, leaning against a fence. He had blood caked on his left arm; he wasn't sure, he said, if it was his or someone else's. One woman was carried out, her femur clearly snapped in two.
The injured were laid out in a triage area near the school. Those with moderate injuries were led to a large green tarp, those with serious injuries to a yellow tarp, and those in the worst shape to a red tarp.
Some victims had their whole heads wrapped in gauze. One man was sitting on a lawn chair; a Barack Obama button was still affixed to his white T-shirt, which was drenched in blood. Helicopters used a nearby soccer field where children had been practicing an hour earlier.
Long after the sun set, family members pressed against police cordons, desperate for information.
At one command post, Frank Haverstock was waiting, frustrated and anxious, behind police tape. Haverstock, 64, of Simi Valley, said his wife, Norma, 53, the manager of a custom drapery house in Burbank, was a regular commuter on the train.
