PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Ten years ago, on May 12, 2015, at 9:21 p.m., Geralyn Ritter was in the first car of Amtrak train 188, en route to New York. Shortly after the northbound train left 30th Street Station, she stood up to get a book from her bag on the overhead luggage rack. Then, the train began to rock.
“The rocking got worse and I remember holding onto that baggage rail with both hands. And then I remember feeling like we were going around a curve, and I was leaning forward, and I remember very clearly thinking that it felt like we were tipping over,” she said.
“But then I thought, no, that can’t be because trains don’t tip. And my last memory is realizing that we were tipping over and I screamed. I remember screaming, and I think I remember other people screaming. And that was my last memory for days until I woke up in intensive care in the hospital.”
The train crashed in Port Richmond and flipped onto its side. Eight passengers were killed and 185 others were injured. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the engineer had sped the train to 106 mph, mistakenly thinking he was past the sharp curve at Frankford Junction, where the train derailed.
Ritter was thrown from the first car. Her ribs were shattered, her abdominal organs were crushed, and her pelvis was broken in half.
Ritter, then a 46-year-old senior vice president at Merck, was airlifted to Penn Presbyterian Hospital as a Jane Doe. Her husband rushed from their North Jersey home and went hospital to hospital until he found her in extremely critical condition.
“I was on a ventilator, I was in a giant neck brace, I was immobilized,” she recalled. “Literally all I could do was blink yes or no.
“My chest was crushed. My orthopedic surgeon described my rib cage as being annihilated, and I went a very long time, notwithstanding the strongest pain drugs out there, where literally every breath hurt,” she said.
‘It hit me like a ton of bricks’
She doesn’t remember the moment of impact, but Ritter later realized it was burned into her subconscious. During her recovery, Ritter found her body repeatedly returning to her last moment of safety.
“As the weeks went on, I would realize I’d wake up in the middle of the night … reaching for the ceiling with both arms, and sometimes even in the middle of the day I’d be in bed and somehow that just felt like the most comfortable position, which was very odd. At first, I attributed it to that long period of being immobilized and when I could only move my arms. But as I was telling someone the story … I remembered I was just holding onto that luggage rail, and I kind of mimed it with my hands above my head — and it just hit me. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought, that’s what I’m doing.
“I talked to a therapist about it and he said [you’re] absolutely right. That is your body trying to protect you. To this day, when I have another surgery or sometimes when I’m terribly stressed … I’ll wake up with at least one arm up in the air.”
It’s been 10 years since that night, when many doctors didn’t expect Ritter to survive. She’s doing well now, she said. Her mind, though, is never far from those who perished.
“Every year, I’m reminded on May 12 how I woke up and it was a normal day. And by the end of the day, people thought I was not going to live,” she said. “That day, it’s so heavy.”
Chronicling trauma
Ritter wrote about her ordeal of dozens of surgeries and painstaking rehab in a book titled “Bone by Bone.” Revisiting her trauma was itself painful but important. All proceeds benefit the American Trauma Society.
“I do not want to make a dime off of telling the story, but I tell it in hopes that it does help somebody else,” she said. “If that book helps one other person, then at least one good thing came out of this accident, which is otherwise just a black hole in my life and a tragedy for so many people.”
While writing the book, Ritter discovered that her pain had a ripple effect on so many other lives.
“I kept learning new things that happened,” she said, “incredibly generous things that people had done for me — not just my family but extended friends, strangers that I didn’t know.”
Writing the book gave her a broader appreciation for her community and family. She revisited a text exchange between her husband and sons the night they were searching for her.
“[My sons] were 12 and 15, and they were calling hospitals, ‘We’re looking for our mom.’ So writing was very difficult; thinking about the worst moments of your life in an intense way was painful. But I also felt like it was almost an obligation.
“I am very often thinking about the eight people that died that night. … I also just feel overwhelmingly sad for the folks that were lost, for what I went through, for what my kids and my husband went through.”
‘A sound and feeling … I’ll never forget’
Eli Kulp also survived the crash, but his life was indelibly altered. He was in the second car on Amtrak train 188.
“I was texting before that, and then I put my phone down and started closing my eyes a little bit. And I felt a shudder, which isn’t abnormal. But a split-second later, that’s when I found myself, because the train veered to the right, on the left side of the train, facing forward.
“It catapulted me into the air. And in that moment when I was in the air, that’s when I was like, all right, this is it.”
In a split second, Kulp’s life would never be the same.
“I turned about 45 degrees in the air, and my neck basically hit square on the luggage rack across the aisle from where I was sitting.”
The train fell onto its side. Kulp was lying on the gravel in the broken windows, buried under rubble, unable to move.
“That moment that my spinal cord was pierced … it felt as if somebody had turned their amp up to like, 10, on an electric guitar and just hit all the chords at once. It was a sound and feeling that went through my body that I’ll never forget,” he said.
At the time, Kulp was a partner in the High Street Hospitality Group, and he was preparing to open a restaurant in New York. However, the celebrated chef at Philadelphia’s Fork restaurant, who was named Food and Wine’s Best New Chef in 2014, found himself suddenly paralyzed.
“It was this new challenge that I was going through in a really positive way, building an exceptional company. So when the accident occurred at that time, it really felt like the rug was pulled out from underneath all of that momentum. And even though we went ahead with the restaurant in New York and everything, nothing was the same anymore.”
After the accident, Kulp was unable to use his hands to cook.
“I wasn’t able to be in the kitchen with the team. I would be in the restaurant for multiple hours a day, but the reality of it is, in a wheelchair, there’s really nowhere for you to hide. I got to this point where I was trying to force a round peg through a square hole. I was trying to hold onto that identity, and it got to the point where it no longer was serving me in a positive way.”
Finding a new purpose
Kulp said the emotional rehab turned out to be as intense as the physical. Through exposure therapy, he relived the incident over and over and over again until he overcame it — a process that took him about five years.
“I get through the grieving process, get my life in order, and start looking at how I can stop grieving what I lost and be more focused on what I still can do.”
Now 47, Kulp is using his culinary talents in front of a microphone on his Chef Radio and Delicious City Philly podcasts.
"I still think I’m a chef. I view myself as a chef, but finding ways that I can reconnect with the industry in a different way that might give me some of that sense of purpose and belonging that I’ve always loved.”
Kulp plans to mark the 10th anniversary by having dinner with friends, remembering the lives that were lost and those forever changed.
“There’s a few aspects that I think about when I think about marking a 10-year anniversary of it,” he said. “A lot of families lost loved ones, so I think about those people. I think about the people who were injured critically and the recovery that they’ve had to endure.”
In the months after the crash, Amtrak installed a system on that stretch of track called positive train control, which would have limited the train’s speed and likely prevented the deadly derailment.