On September 12, 2008, at 4:22 p.m. in California’s San Fernando Valley, a Metrolink commuter train carrying 225 passengers hit a Union Pacific freight train head-on.
The crash, which became known as the Chatsworth crash, left 135 people injured and 25 people dead. One of the victims was 49-year-old Charles E. Peck, a Delta Air Lines customer service agent from Salt Lake City International Airport.
Peck had come to Los Angeles for a job interview at Van Nuys Airport. He wanted to get a job in California so he could marry his fiancée, Andrea Katz of Westlake Village. The couple had decided to wait until they lived in the same state before getting married. Andrea was driving to the train station to pick him up when she heard about the crash on the radio. His parents and siblings, who lived in the Los Angeles area, came to join her at the scene.
For the next 11 hours, Peck’s cell phone made 35 calls to his family members, including his son, brother, stepmother, sister, and fiancée. When they answered, they only heard static. When they tried calling back, the calls went straight to voicemail. “You look at your phone and it’s Dad!” his son CJ told the Daily Breeze in 2008. “He can’t be dead.” His sister Barbara Lopez said, “For us, it was just hope. We had no idea he had already perished.”
The strange calls helped find Peck’s body
The calls from Peck’s phone gave his family hope that he was still alive and stuck somewhere in the wreckage. Search crews tracked the phone’s signal to find where it was coming from and looked through that part of the crash site. They found Peck’s body about an hour after the calls stopped at around 3:28 a.m., about 12 hours after the accident.
Investigators said Peck died right when the crash happened. The coroner found no signs that he lived even for a short time after the crash. His cell phone was never found in the wreckage. Many people have different ideas about why the phone kept making calls. Some think it broke during the crash and something was pressing on the screen or speed dial buttons. Others cannot explain why the calls only went to his closest family members and not to other people in his contact list. This case is now one of the mysterious unsolved cases that still makes people wonder years later.
The National Transportation Safety Board later found out that the Metrolink engineer had missed a red signal light. They found proof that he had been sending text messages to teenagers and sent his last message just 22 seconds before the crash. The investigation showed that this terrible accident could have been stopped if the engineer had been watching the signals instead of using his phone.
The Chatsworth crash is still the worst accident in Metrolink’s history. The tragedy brought big changes to railway safety rules. While investigators figured out what caused the crash, the mystery of Charles Peck’s phone calls still makes people talk about it. Some believe it was just a broken phone acting up, while others wonder if something strange happened that cannot be explained. The case has become part of bizarre missing person cases and strange events that catch people’s attention, even though Peck’s body was found.
