Ignoring The News Has Its Dangers
Photos from the overhead TV at a bar, the day after the Carlsbad Villiage train station Surfliner suicide.
It was quite a scene last week. Here’s an image from the train suicide in Carlsbad village at the train station, a screenshot of the victim’s shoe with a paperback book on the tracks. Then the others are images from a TV monitor at a bar the next day, Tuesday, in North County, when the 5 o-clock news is describing how there had been 4 train track deaths in San Diego County over the last 4 days. It had been 5 days, from Thursday to Monday, but that detail of the news item is insignificant compared to the cluster of deaths by train in San Diego County within the last week.
One death had been identified as a man who was walking his dog, and they have his name. The others are still unidentified. That would include the man whose death scene we arrived at the scene of, Cori Kat and I, moments after it happened in Carlsbad village at the train station.
If the other 3 are members of the homeless community as I suspect they are then maybe the housing unaffordability crisis should be addressed through developer taxation. If the real esate developers only want to build for the wealthy then they should pay higher taxes. If the victims were drug addicts then let’s provide greater community outreach for chemical dependency treatment. There is a cause for this recent trend, one no one is talking about yet. It’s not all a strange coincidence.
The video of the man named Frank who saw the actual act of the victim intentionally stepping in front of the train and raising his hands out to each side of him while facing the train is posted on YouTube. The full video that I had shot originally of Cori’s self-help methods and then the scene at the train station as we were walking and talking has not been uploaded yet because it was not accepted by YouTube’s algorithms, or admins, or both, due to how graphic it was. But I’m looking into getting that edited right now.
I just feel it’s strange that the video was automatically kicked back by the YouTube algorithms when there are other things even more graphic on the platform, actual murderers being shown on law enforcement dash cams etcetera, plus movies that Hollywood produces theatrically that are far more graphic. This recent train-death cluster in San Diego County is something that needs to be examined, and the video from Monday could or should be part of that. But nobody is talking about it.
