I have spent this past weekend in a daze.
Friday night, I found out that a good high school friend, Katie Longawa, 18, had been on the train that crashed in Chatsworth in a head on collision with a freight train. She was on her way home from USC, where she just started her first semester of college. Now, she lies in the ICU of a Mission Hills hospital.
That day, I was going to meet her for lunch at USC, as I would have been there with some classmates for a journalism event. For one reason or another, we did not go, which, retrospectively, was a good thing, since we would have ended up on that train to get home.
Over the course of this weekend, I’ve heard stories from many people around my hometown of Thousand Oaks about someone they knew on the train, or who regularly rode the rails but for one day didn’t. This past Friday, everything suddenly became connected. One routine train ride carrying 220 passengers had created a seemingly endless web of individual stories, links to others and unsettling “What if?” questions.
The father of a Thousand Oaks High School student was killed. An Oaks Christian English teacher was killed. A good friend’s father normally rides the MetroLink to work, but didn’t go in on Friday. One individual missed the train to get a cup of coffee with a friend. Another good friend would ride that train to and fro to work this summer in the lab at USC before he moved away for school. And this is just what I have heard personally.
The point is, with a tragedy of this magnitude and proximity, almost every local of Moorpark, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks will have some personal connection to the crash, albeit direct or indirect.
On Saturday, I attended the Bat Mitzvah of a friend’s sister. During the course of the ceremony, the rabbis said a healing prayer and invited the guests to say aloud the name of someone in need of healing. Not typically a religious person, I still spoke up and said Katie’s name. Like myself, for a long time to come, the victims and families of the MetroLink crash will be in our thoughts and prayers.
