Killer Train: After 180 deaths, Brightline safeguards are still lacking

Ian Savage, a rail-safety expert at Northwestern University, said Brightline’s location makes the train more dangerous. Brightline shares its tracks with freight trains on the Florida East Coast Railway, feet away from major highways such as U.S. 1.

“If you were building this from scratch,” Savage said, “you would never do this.”

‘Stop victim blaming’

In South Florida, where most of the dead were struck, slow freight trains and fast Brightline trains come and go on two parallel tracks, sometimes from opposite directions.

In Brightline’s first week of service, the train struck and killed a man on a bicycle. Jeffrey King, 51, was pedaling home from work at Troy’s Barbecue and tried to beat the train on Ocean Avenue in Boynton Beach.

A video from the front of the train showed King looking straight ahead, unaware of what was coming.

King’s was the fourth Brightline death. Members of Congress demanded answers. Marco Rubio, then a U.S. senator, called for a federal review of the train’s safety record.

U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fort Pierce, rejected Brightline’s public comments that people like King should simply heed safety warnings at the crossings.

“Stop victim blaming and take responsibility for the fact that your trains are killing people,” Mast tweeted at the time, sharing a story about King’s death. “Trains should stop running until massive safety flaws are resolved.”

The company’s president, Patrick Goddard, told a congressional committee in April 2018 that those claiming the train was unsafe “choose to ignore the facts and the actual police reports surrounding these incidents, a common theme of bending information to suit their anti-progress narrative.”

“Every person who has died on our railroad has either chosen to end their lives or been under the influence of drugs,” he said.

Brightline President Patrick Goddard addressed the train’s safety record at a hearing of the House Oversight committee in April 2018.

Two of the six deaths by then were ruled suicides. The rest of the victims tested positive for drugs, but it’s unclear whether that played any role in their deaths. King had marijuana in his system, but the Palm Beach County medical examiner’s office told the Herald/WLRN team that it’s impossible to know whether he was impaired, based on his toxicology results.

In public statements, the company has combined suicides and cases where a person had drugs in their system, claiming in 2020 that 75% of deaths were “the results of suicide or drugs.”

The suggestion that most Brightline fatalities were self-inflicted baffles the brother of Randy Johanson, a 62-year-old whose gruesome death last year occurred at the Barefoot Boulevard railroad crossing in Micco, north of Vero Beach.

Johanson was having a typical day. He walked to the Winn-Dixie liquor store, bought a few tiny, black-cherry-infused whiskey bottles and headed toward home.

Brittany Wallman

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Miami Herald

It wasn’t far. But he would have to cross the tracks, and a train he had never heard of was whizzing along at 102 miles an hour.

Johanson was deaf — he had measles as a child. At home beside his bed, he had left his hearing aids. His uneaten lunch, ramen noodles, sat on the counter.

He walked past the warning gate and was just across the tracks when the train hit him, video shows. Trains extend beyond the track about three feet on each side, and a second or two would have made a difference. The engineer noted Johanson “was kind of like shuffling, and didn’t look up at us.”

Johanson’s brother, Daniel, a retired Lockheed Martin engineer, choked up during an interview at his Melbourne home in March as he cut into a sealed brown envelope marked as biohazard. He had been holding onto it for a year, avoiding it. He used the scissors as tongs, pulling out his brother’s blood-spattered ID cards and wallet. Remembering how the train “decimated” his brother’s body, he said he just doesn’t understand.

“My thought, being an engineer,” he said, “is that you pre-plan your projects, and you consider all those safety issues … before you start running a train at 110 miles an hour through small towns where people aren’t even aware of what’s going on.”

Randy Johanson’s death initially was ruled a suicide by the Brevard County Medical Examiner’s Office, then changed to “undetermined.” Daniel Johanson said his brother loved fishing and watching reruns of “M*A*S*H.” Randy’s death was not a suicide, he said.

“I think it’s a travesty that they would even make that supposition, you know, without any evidence to support that,” he said.

‘Never looked up’

Danny Black, a photographer, was crossing the tracks in North Miami in the fall of 2023 when he was hit by a Brightline train.

The train conductor told police that Black, 55, was wearing headphones and “never looked up or seemed to know that the train was approaching.”

Black’s home was a few blocks away. He was walking east, to an area with restaurants and a Publix. He had taken up jogging to lose weight. He loved NASCAR. He was “a wonderful man,” his sister Jody McDonald said, crying, in an interview at her Canaveral Groves home in March.

Brittany Wallman

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Miami Herald

A neighborhood road abuts the tracks, and a path through the grass shows Black wasn’t the first to trespass in a location where there was no official crossing.

Brightline’s tracks run near schools, parks and neighborhoods. Homeless encampments have sprung up. Well-worn trespassing paths are evident throughout the route.

For Black, using the official crossing would have added several blocks to his trek. In one cul-de-sac in Palm Beach Gardens, pedestrians trying to get to a neighborhood mall would have to take a 1.5-mile detour to get to the nearest official crossing.

“If anything else killed that many people, they would take it away,” McDonald said. “Whatever they’re doing isn’t working.”

Even if there’s a well-worn path, walking onto the tracks if you’re not at an official crossing is trespassing in Florida, a misdemeanor. Brightline officials emphasize that people such as Black were breaking the law. Trespassing is frequent along the Florida East Coast Railway tracks that Brightline shares, a problem that the Florida Department of Transportation detailed in a 2021 report.

Brightline was warned of the risk years earlier. The FEC railroad, which birthed the city of Miami and many others along Florida’s eastern seaboard, was one of the nation’s most treacherous rail corridors going back decades. In 2016 and 2017, just before Brightline launched, 54 people were killed by FEC freight trains, according to federal data. It was the railroad’s deadliest two-year stretch since at least 1975.

FEC freight trains, which travel at slower speeds, have killed 132 people since 2018, a fatality rate of 13 deaths per million miles. Brightline’s rate, about 24 deaths per million miles, far outpaces that.

Despite the corridor’s deadly history, Brightline spent years disputing the need for safety upgrades and downplaying warnings from local governments and regulators, reporters found.

Frank Frey, a Federal Railroad Administration engineer, was part of a team of regulators and railroad officials who walked the Brightline route in 2014 during a federal review process. In a subsequent report, Frey warned that trespassing across the tracks had reached “epidemic” proportions.

Frey urged Brightline to install fencing to direct pedestrians to crossings, and he called on the company to add crossing-gate arms and median dividers north of West Palm Beach to deter drivers from going around gates where trains would exceed 80 mph. Brightline resisted.

“[T]hey are not exercising appropriate safety practices and reasonable care,” Frey wrote in the report.

After Frey’s report became public, and amid pressure from Martin and Indian River counties, FDOT — the agency responsible for rail safety in Florida — said it would require Brightline to follow the federal guidance.

But those safety measures only applied to the 110-mph span of track that opened in late 2023 north of West Palm Beach. Crossing upgrades were less common in the South Florida counties (Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade), where most of the deaths occur.

About 100 crossings have just two gate arms, one on each side of the tracks, which means drivers can still veer into the wrong lane to drive across. Brightline officials say the remaining 69% of the 331 crossings have four gate arms, and some have median dividers to keep people from driving into the other lane.

State bills introduced in 2017, 2018 and 2020 would have expanded FDOT’s authority to regulate Brightline, and would have required the rail company to pay for fencing at popular trespassing shortcuts and for safety equipment at crossings. Brightline opposed the bills — and each time, the legislation died without reaching a floor vote.

Brightline argued that the bills improperly targeted the company and weren’t needed.

The company was arguing against stricter fencing requirements. Rusty Roberts, then a Brightline official, said it was ineffective, expensive and difficult to maintain. Brightline officials recently told reporters that fencing that the company installed near the Aventura station has been knocked down three times.

Footage taken from a Brightline train on Feb. 19, 2025, shows the open tracks along Dixie Highway in Pompano Beach. Matias J. Ocner / Miami Herald

But in 2022, when a federal grant offering millions of dollars for fencing became available, Brightline was on board. FDOT submitted an application, with Brightline’s support.

Now, company officials say fencing, though not a “cure-all,” is a good idea. Lefevre, the vice president of operations, recently called it “common sense” and said it would have an “immediate impact.”

“When done in the right area and with the proper length, fencing can be a benefit to channel pedestrians to the nearest crossing,” Lefevre said in a statement.

Under terms of the grant, Brightline will spend $10 million on safeguards, while federal and state governments will spend $35 million. That will pay for 33 miles of protective fencing and landscaping along the tracks, warning markings at crossings, and 168 crisis-support signs for people who are suicidal.

In the 33 months before the funding was released, 101 people died.

The U.S. Department of Transportation blamed the delay on a “grant backlog” from the Biden administration. In a statement to the Herald/WLRN, spokesman Nate Sizemore said the Federal Railroad Administration “has worked to hold Brightline … accountable to the highest standards.” He said drivers and trespassing pedestrians were “the direct cause” of all of Brightline’s fatalities.

“We will continue to closely review any safety incident with Brightline and work with the railroad to prevent future occurrences,” Sizemore said.

Brightline declined to provide information to the Herald/WLRN on exactly how much of the nearly 200-mile route between Miami and Cocoa is currently protected by fencing, vegetation or other barriers. The tracks are easily accessible in most of South Florida.

In April, reporters visited the stretch of track where Maddie Brunelle died eight years ago in Boca Raton. It was still unfenced.

Maddie was an artist, an A student who had been admitted to college. But she was in a personal crisis. That afternoon in 2017, she walked out of a recovery center in Boca Raton, and, just a few blocks away, saw the open tracks.

Her mother, Amy, told reporters that getting to the tracks was too easy. Suicide can be an impulsive act, she noted, and the Brightline train runs past communities of “vulnerable” people.

According to FDOT, the FEC/Brightline tracks are surrounded by “disadvantaged communities” and “areas of persistent poverty.”

“What scares me is how much open track there is,” Brunelle said, “and how close it is to public areas.”

Experts say barriers and other measures can help. At San Francisco’s Golden Gate and Tampa’s Sunshine Skyway bridges, safety netting, fencing, signs and emergency call boxes have curbed suicides.

’Should be permanently closed!’

As she inched her Honda forward at a railroad crossing in North Miami in March 2023, a young mother made a terrible mistake. Traffic wasn’t moving. The gates came down in front of her, and she was stuck on the tracks. A Brightline train was coming.

The 28-year-old had only seconds to decide what to do. She flung the door open, grabbed her 2-year-old son out of the back seat, left the car that she had just bought that day, and ran.

The train slammed into her car 42 seconds later.

The crossing at 141st Street and U.S. 1 is one of the most dangerous along the Brightline route. At least seven times, Brightline trains have crashed into cars, mostly after drivers have scrambled to exit before impact.

Officials have discussed closing the crossing to traffic for years, so cars would no longer be able to drive across the tracks. In a 2023 email, Frey, the federal rail official, said regulators “pleaded with City officials to close this, but sadly the City declined.”

“There is absolutely no reason why this crossing should exist,” Frey wrote. “It should be permanently closed!”

The 141st Street crossing is one of nearly two dozen that regulators recommended for closure more than 10 years ago. All of them remain open today.