Turning Tragedy into Safety: Blancarte v. Amtrak

ENSURING PUBLIC SAFETY can be a major goal of wrongful death lawsuits. Such was the case with the tragic death of a child on an Amtrak platform in 1993 and the resultant settlement effected by SBD partner Frank Darras.

On 16 June 1993, five-year-old Amber Blancarte was at Union Station in Los Angeles, along with her mother and three-year-old brother, waiting for her father. Amber and her brother discovered a way to pass the time: by playing in an unsupervised, unattended Amtrak luggage cart that was being charged nearby.

There were no cones or warning signs around the cart, so even Amber’s mother considered the cart a harmless distraction. She was soon terrified, though, as she turned around to see the cart traveling in reverse towards a cement pillar with Amber sitting helplessly in the back. The cart struck the pillar, jarring Amber halfway out of the cart. Then it hit another, crushing the girl, as her brother and mother watched on in horror.

Upon being contacted by the Blancarte family, Frank Darras immediately began researching the circumstances surrounding their tragedy. He discovered that a similar incident has occurred at Union Station only ten months earlier and that Amtrak had taken no action to improve public safety. Darras soon came to see that Amtrak’s indifference to the situation amounted to gross negligence.

By reaching a $2 million out-of-court settlement with Amtrak and Metrolink – the largest settlement in California involving the death of a child under the age of seven – Darras compelled the companies to redesign their luggage carts, to add to the carts new safety features, to ensure that keys are never left in the carts and to store the carts in a secure area.

Although Darras’s settlement and the safety measures it induced could not retract the Blancarte’s terrible loss, it ensured that such a horrific scene would never again play out near our nation’s railways.