Lives altered in and outside L.A. train collision

Broken bodies
Landis is unsure how long he was unconscious, but when he awoke he was trapped in the wreckage with a pair of firefighters standing above him, trying to get him out.

Another passenger was shouting for help. Saws were cutting through metal somewhere else on the train.

His cell phone was ringing nonstop but he couldn't move his arm to answer it. It was his wife who had been waiting for him at the train station with their three sons, ages 7, 5 and 1 month, and who was becoming increasingly certain with each unanswered call that he would never answer.

"I thought my arm was cut off," Landis said. "There was an arm laying across my body ... and I was touching the arm. So I told the firemen my arm had been severed. But I could hear the firemen talking to each other, and they said 'No, that's a DB.' A dead body."

It had landed on top of him.

The first car had indeed been the deadliest place to be. But the impact was so severe that even people in the rear car had been killed.

"I found two bodies on a staircase in the third car, one on top of the other," Eckstein said.

Landis was one of the first to be flown by helicopter to a hospital. He was relieved when he was finally in flight, but he worried when doctors said they wanted to put him in a medically induced coma while he recovered from serious internal injuries.

He had suffered a bruised heart, bruised lungs, broken ribs, a broken back, broken arm, fractured sternum, internal bleeding and had a wrist dislocated so badly it would need surgery.

Doctors were able to keep him conscious during his recovery. After five days in intensive care, he was transferred to a regular hospital room. He took his first steps Tuesday, but he doesn't expect to be going home anytime soon.

'I hope he died peacefully'
When Metrolink resumed service Monday, Romero returned to the train, and he and other emotional passengers hugged and wept.

He posted a note at the Simi Valley station listing fellow riders he knows only by first name and asking them to call and tell him they're OK.

He found himself paying more attention to anyone he has a chance encounter with, not just his train friends. He'll pause to smile and say hi, and one day last week he picked up some Mickey Mouse stickers at work and handed them out to everyone in the second car.

"Things are starting to get back into place," he said, striking a more upbeat tone. "I don't know if it will ever get back in place to the full extent, but it's getting there."

Buckley had told his family that when he died he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered from the back of a train.

His son doubts that it's legal to spread the ashes from the back of the train, but his family hopes to scatter them off a bridge above the tracks.

"He died truly doing something he loved," Buckley said of his father. "But I hope he died peacefully and not in some mangled steel. That's a hard thought to get out of my head."

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