unfortunate editorial choices

[sagehen]

>from the 1/19/05 Palo Alto Daily News, p. 1 headline
>   Prominent
>   local hit by
>   train, dies
>
>the sad story of "Robert Pringle, a 54-year-old father of three and
>member of one of the Peninsula's most recognized families", who died
>after being struck by a Caltrain in Menlo Park.  the p. 1 story says:
>"The coroner has not ruled on the cause of death."
>
>the jump from p. 1 to the continuation on p. 58 is CALTRAIN.
>
>alas, the pickup on p. 58 is SUICIDE.  a precipitous judgment, an
>unfortunate editorial choice, though likely to be accurate.
>
>well, we have a suicide a month, roughly, on the train line that runs
>south from san francisco, north from san jose, just two blocks from my
>house.  level grade crossings, so you can just walk out onto the line
>and face your death as you want to.  distraught teenagers, the down and
>out, the lonely elderly slipping uncontrollably into alzheimer's,
>people of all ages and stations who are depressed, often without their
>friends and families having any sense of the depth of their despair.
>some of them lie down on the tracks or curl into a ball, so as not to
>be so visible.  some of them face the oncoming train right on, standing
>up.
>
>it's hell on the engineers who drive the trains.
>
>arnold
~~~~~~~~~~
An old family friend, an historian at Stanford who lived in Menlo Park, met
his death in just this manner, perhaps at the same level crossing, in 1953
or 54.  I never heard a breath of suspicion that it was suicide.  He was
totally deaf & the accident was attributed to that.
A. Murie
p.s. in another unfortunate editorial choice, I learned of this, in
Berkeley, listening to the  radio news, which declared that a man,
identified as so & so, was "decapitated by a passing train" while taking
his daily walk, &c.