PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Prosecutors were expected to wrap their case Wednesday against the Amtrak engineer charged with involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment in the May 2015 Frankford train crash.
The instructor who trained Brandon Bostian told investigators he was "shocked as hell" to hear Bostian was at the helm of the derailed train that killed eight people and injured hundreds more. He said every engineer should have "situational awareness" while steering.
Bostian said in an interview he remembers listening to a SEPTA train engineer calling into dispatch about rocks being thrown at another train, causing the windshield to shatter — and the defense said that's what caused his disorientation.
But prosecutors said it was negligence, and he had a duty to know where he was on the track and how fast to go, even while listening to radio dispatch.
Prosecutors went through video of Amtrak 188's ride, as signals and colors flashed. Both the instructor and another Amtrak expert told jurors what speeds Bostian should have been going, but investigators have said he was speeding up to double the limit of the 50 miles per hour zone.
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Defense attorney Robert Goggin argued that Amtrak was in the midst of installing "positive train control," but had only finished on one side of the track. The other side had no safety mechanism for a speeding train.
"This train crash would never have happened from 1975 to 2010, but now it did, because Amtrak had turned it off," said Goggin.
"Somebody decided that at some point in time that curve was too safe and that someone could turn it off."
Bostian told agents he had "memory gaps" about what led to the crash.
"He's terrified. Of course he's terrified," said Goggin.
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"He's a guy that went out there into a volatile situation on the tracks - criminality, saboteurs on the track. He was sent in there. No implementation of SEPTA's active shooter program, no police sent in. No protections whatsoever. He got sent in. God knows what happened. But for the first time in his entire career, an imperfection occurred for various reasons on the track, not the least of which was those criminals that were out there, and now he is in a courtroom hoping not to spend the next several years of his life in prison."
According to phone records, Bostian called his parents when he came to, then 911, and eventually texted his partner on an app to say what happened.
Investigators concluded all of his devices were powered off until after the crash — including an iPad found zipped up in a case inside the cabin.
The defense is expected to call several locomotive experts to counter the prosecution's case.