At 5:30 PM on January 22, 1956, dusk was falling over the City of Los Angeles, California. 161 passengers, plus an unknown number of children five and under were seated on Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe train No. 82, pulling out of Mission Tower heading to San Diego. Frank B. Parrish, 61, had the controls. He had been driving trains for 37 years and by seniority had earned the right to this coveted 9.6 mile route. Among the passengers was Parrish's wife, Catherine, 42. Just under fifteen minutes later, she would be listed as one of the injured. With minor injuries, she was one of the lucky ones.
"It was just getting dark on a winter evening and the call came out," explains William W. Wilhelm, an LAPD motorcycle officer with three years on at the time of the accident. "Ray [Bowman] and I were sitting at an intersection on Olympic and some other cross-street thinking about going to dinner." When their radios crackled to life, they were astonished by the dispatcher's request. She commanded all motorcycle officers to head to the scene of a train wreck in East LA—all Code Three. "You do not dispatch more than one unit Code Three due to the danger of collision at intersections," Wilhelm states. "I looked at my partner and he looked at me and we asked if this was a joke. It didn't make sense." Regardless, both officers headed towards the freeway.
When No. 82 left the station, standard safety routines were followed. The brakes were tested and appeared functional and although the speedometer had been reported malfunctioning earlier in the day, it was working fine now. At three miles into the trip, No. 82 had gained speed. Traveling around 70 miles per hour, the train plunged through the dusk. When they reached Redondo Junction, something was wrong, not with the train—with the engineer.
Heading towards the scene, Wilhelm states, "We didn't get very far on the freeway before there were 40 or 50 of us on the freeway going Code Three, then we ran into stopped traffic. Even ambulances were stopped. We went through the cars. This shows first hand why the city has motorcycles." Weaving in and out of the stalled traffic, nothing could prepare him for what he was about to encounter. Nothing could compare to the carnage at the junction.
A sign had warned the train to slow to 15 mph for an upcoming curve. Fireman Homer Smith, 42, states he called out the sign and Parrish acknowledged with a wave. No. 82 didn't slow–instead, it appeared to pick up speed. Smith called for Parrish to throw the emergency brake. It either didn't work or it didn't help enough. Just over a thousand feet west of the interlocking station, the 234,120 lb. aluminum train tipped over. The DC-191 and DC-192 train cars slid over multiple tracks sending sparks for 300 yards. When the train came to a rest, 428 feet away on its left side, the results were catastrophic.
"Oh, my God, This is worse than I thought," Wilhelm realized when he arrived on scene. "The train was lying on its side. It was very ghastly to stand up there on top of those train cars, standing on the side, and hear the moaning and groaning of people who were still alive and in horrible pain and can't figure out what happened. The firemen had a ladder up there and a ladder down inside. They were carrying bodies up and we were up there taking bodies and they were alive. Some of them lost their arms and legs." Although the inside of No. 82's windows had laminated, hermetically-sealed safety glass, the force of the rails underneath and the bodies inside proved too much for them. "The people fell against the glass and it broke so their arms and their heads went out," Wilhelm says. "We had thirty-some bodies stacked up along side one of the train cars like cord wood. It was a gory mess. Every now and then an ambulance would get in and we would fill it up with bodies and send it off."
Like most tragedies, the destruction brought everyone out of the woodwork. The crowd was getting out of control. They were blocking in the ambulances and some unscrupulous citizens were stealing from the bodies. Inspector Noel McQuon was the officer in charge at the scene and he had a bullhorn. "There were hundreds of people and all of them wanted to get into the scene," explains Wilhelm. "McQuon couldn't get all the people to conform and nobody even acknowledged him." Taking command, McQuon ordered the motorcycle officers to line up handlebar to handlebar and push the people out of the way. "So, we pushed these people because they wouldn't move otherwise," states Wilhelm. "Among them was a few reporters and they didn't like being pushed. Some said their cameras and such were dropped and damaged. They put all kinds of claims saying they got knocked down or injured in some way. It was all dollar signs. This went on pretty much the same until we got all the bodies and all the injured out of there."
Due to the mangled bodies, an accurate tally of the dead was difficult–listed as high as 88 at one point. Then it dropped to 47, before eventually settling at 30 dead and 122 injured. Three of the dead and half the injured were children. In addition, more than a dozen were now orphans. After investigations by the Interstate Commerce Commission and a coroner's inquest, the wreck was ruled an accident caused by excessive speed on a curve. Parrish claimed to have blacked out prior to the curve, and a medical examination including brain scans showed he had suffered a fugue due to a brain abnormality caused by several previous illnesses.
"There were so many things throughout the years [that stuck with me about this event]," Wilhelm explains. Seeing all those bodies there stacked like cord wood and a lot of blood around. I was a Marine in World War II. I don't think I had seen anything more gory before that or since. To think these are human beings that a couple hours before that were normal people walking around. It's so tragic to see something like that to feel the pain of just seeing them there like that. It makes you feel sad and helpless."