Two Portage Toddlers Struck By Freight Train
CHICAGO (CBS)--A two-year-old girl is fighting for her life tonight after being struck by a freight train.
Her three-year-old brother was killed.
How could it happen? CBS 2's Roseanne Tellez was in Portage, Indiana tonight where train tracks and a mobile home community run side-by-side.
The children slipped out of the family mobile home Tuesday at Woodland Village. They walked less than a few hundred feet to the train tracks.
One neighbor described the squealing sound of the train applying the brakes
"It's almost like a death curdle sound--you're hauling tons of equipment on it and you can't stop," Robert Gowens said.
A Norfolk Southern freight train sat idle on CSX tracks near Willow Creek Road in Portage, after striking the two toddlers--Ellie, 2, and Caleb, 3.
Gowens heard the horns.
"I could see the conductor come by--he was throwing his arms up,"Gowens said. "You could tell he was panicking or something."
The children's grandfather, Bryon Benson, says the kids slipped out of a broken screen door on the family mobile home and wandered onto the tracks while their mom was doing laundry.
"She came in and said, 'dad the kids are gone,' (so) I got on my shoes and went one way, my brother went one way," Benson said. "It's dumbfounding to me how they even got out with three grown adults there."
Ellie today is fighting for her life at Comer Children's Hospital in Chicago.
"These kids were loving kids," Benson said. "Caleb--he's a terror but he he was a joy to be around."
Neighbors say that with so many children in the community-it's time to do something.
"If there was seriously a fence put up from one end of the park to the other, this would've not have happened--I guarantee it," Gowens said.
Neighbors say they're not sure if it would be the responsibility of the mobile home park or the railroad to build such a fence.
They are also hoping that all parents here will warn their children of the dangers these passing trains, and watch them carefully.