Rachel Parsons
To look at a railroad map of Fort Worth is to look at a spider’s web. The city has 193 highway-rail grade crossings, or points where tracks cross streets. This is the largest number per capita of any other big city in Texas, according to Fort Worth’s transportation department. There’s ample reason. In 1876, the first railroad, the Texas and Pacific Railway, pulled into a town that was essentially a frontier nonentity. People associate the old town with the cattle trade (from whence the moniker “Cowtown” came) or oil, but in reality, the railroads were largely responsible for the city’s growth and eventual economic prosperity, according to local historian Richard Selcer. Which meant that by the turn of the 20th century, “the railroads owned Fort Worth. They got whatever they wanted, the way they wanted it, and that was part of the deal,” he says. Grand thoroughfares such as Lancaster Avenue were named for railroad company presidents whose firms poured millions of dollars into the city.
Railway companies wielded so much power that when there were accidents in the early decades of rail expansion, there wasn’t much the city could do to make things safer. There was nothing to help or hinder pedestrians or vehicles crossing tracks. “If you wanted to go from downtown to the south side of Fort Worth,” Selcer says, “you simply took your life in your hands and crossed the tracks. And if you got hit or had to crawl under a train or over a train, that was your problem, too bad.”
Rachel Parsons
Joe Parsons
Joe Parsons’ eyes were turquoise. Not blue, turquoise. He was a quiet, sober man, but his wife could make him laugh, so he smiled at her. He didn’t smile at many others. He wasn’t mean; he was just stoic. “I’m smiling on the inside,” he was fond of saying when people prodded him about it.
An oppressive, humid Texas heat wave engulfed much of the state late that May in 1980. Before the summer was over, it would bring a record 42 days of consecutive triple-digit temperatures. But no one was thinking about that in the tiny white wood-sided house on Trentman Street on the southeast side of Fort Worth that Thursday morning. Rhonda and Joe got up just after sunrise, around 6:30 a.m., as usual. She headed into the kitchen to fix him some coffee. He took a shower; he always showered in the morning. Both were careful not wake the children sleeping in the second bedroom. The 14-month-old, me, the writer of this story, hadn’t slept much at all for the first six months of life and was finally sleeping through the night. The teenager, my half-brother Jody from Joe’s first marriage, was 16 and likely could’ve slept through a tornado.
Joe dressed in his standard work attire: blue jeans, tan leather cowboy boots, and collared shirt. When it was warm, he’d roll up the sleeves. The morning routine in the little house they’d bought was normal. The mood was not. They talked, Rhonda would later say, “but it was a little bit strained. It had gotten a little bit weird around there.” That morning, she remembered, it was small talk, not the kind of real conversation they sometimes had in the quiet early morning hours if there were household issues to discuss. It had gotten a little bit weird because Joe had withdrawn in the weeks leading to Thursday, May 29. They had an unusually strong bond, and they didn’t keep things from one another. She’d asked several times during those days if everything was all right. Yes, everything was fine, he’d say. “He didn’t know any reason for it. And neither did I,” she said. He left without saying goodbye. It made a strange situation even more unfathomable, since he was a stickler for saying I love you. She turned around and he wasn’t there. She walked to the screen door and saw him getting in their beige Ford pickup to go to work. He turned the engine over and got ready to back out, “then he looked over at me,” she said. His expression wasn’t sad, “but it wasn’t a real pleasant look either ... it was just different for us.”
“Later it felt like he hadn’t wanted to say goodbye,” she said. “It was almost like he was leaving real fast before he had to talk.” It was the only day in their married life that they hadn’t given each other a goodbye kiss and said I love you.
As the sun heated the pavement and the air grew swampier, Joe drove about 22 miles east to the truck yard at Mission Petroleum Carriers, Inc. in Arlington, where he’d worked for roughly a year and a half, usually six days a week. As always, even in the coldest weather, he drove with the driver’s side window cracked so he could better hear traffic. He’d lost some hearing in his left ear in Vietnam. Once at work, likely sometime between 7:30 and 8 a.m., Joe Parsons prepped the gasoline delivery tanker he drove for a living and headed out for his first drops.
At 6:30 a.m., northwest of Fort Worth, a little farther than the house on Trentman was to the southeast, four other men were also getting ready for the workday. Engine foreman Charlie Norman and three other crewmen were starting the morning shift at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe suburban Saginaw railroad yard. They had orders to ride about eight miles downtown to the 17th Street yard on the southeast edge of the city center, pick up nine freight cars, and pull them to another railroad’s yard on the north side of the city.
Of the four crew, three of them, Norman, Vernon Pickard, and Okley Moss, were Santa Fe veterans close to retirement, who’d known one another for decades. The train’s engineer that morning, John Taylor, was the new kid on the block. It’s unclear how long he’d worked for the company — those records no longer exist — but Pickard had known Taylor for five or six years, and he’d “probably been on the [engineering] job for three, maybe four months,” Moss would later recall.
The crew left the Saginaw yard sometime between 8 and 8:30 a.m., according to depositions later taken from Norman, Pickard, and Moss. A little less than three miles before their destination, the crew rolled over Northeast 23rd Street, just beside the point it intersects with Samuels Avenue, as they headed south on the Santa Fe tracks to the downtown yard. Norman later testified that he’d crossed 23rd Street an average of twice a day, five days a week for 41 years as a Santa Fe employee. Once downtown, the crew linked their engine, locomotive number 2051, to one covered hopper — a car that carried dried bulk products like grain or sand — and seven box cars, followed by two gondolas, or low-sided cars with open tops.
The men climbed into the crew cab at the front of the blue and yellow Santa Fe engine, leaving the door of cab on the front left of the compartment open for ventilation, as they often did in hot weather. Engineer John Taylor was at controls on the right side of the cab, if looking forward from the inside of the space. Pickard and Norman took the only other seats in the cab on the left wall, Pickard in front facing the open door and Norman immediately behind. Moss was sitting on “a can in the floor” that he’d made himself to store his rain gear in.
There are no records of how long it took the short train to make the trip out of the city center. As the crow flies, it would take a little more than eight minutes to travel about 2.7 miles from the Fort Worth 17th Street yard to the Northeast 23rd Street crossing at 20 miles an hour, the approximate speed that Norman, Moss, and Pickard later estimated they were traveling. Once firmly underway, though, the train rolled north back along the same tracks the crew had traveled from Saginaw.
Rachel Parsons
At roughly 10:30 a.m., Joe Parsons finished delivering 9,000 gallons of gasoline to a Sigmor station on North Main Street on Fort Worth’s Northside. He swung the empty tanker south on Main and drove four blocks before turning left on to East Northside Drive. Within a few seconds, he crossed the West Fork Trinity River, and a few seconds after that, he came to Samuels Avenue.
As Joe maneuvered his rig into the left turn from Northside Drive to Samuels Avenue, the train slid under the Northside Drive overpass just east of Samuels. At that point, the road and the tracks were roughly 550 feet apart, running not quite parallel. In the sticky heat of midmorning, the gasoline truck and the locomotive rumbled north at about the same speed. Another thousand feet and the tanker and train approached the northern horseshoe of the West Fork Trinity River, one of city’s defining geologic features. The two paths narrow, and at midriver Samuels and the tracks lay about 226 feet apart. According to the crewmen, as required by regulation, they started blowing the train’s horn at the whistle board — a designated sign just before their bridge.
That’s when the crew first noticed the truck on its bridge over the water to the left, running “slightly in front” of the train that was just about to cross the river. Moss said the tanker was “traveling about the same speed we were.” According to his deposition, Moss kept his eyes on the truck, but none of the men noticed anything unusual; it was normal practice for everyone in the cab to look out for traffic. They were all familiar with the Samuels/23rd Street intersection.
The intersection was convoluted. Leading north into an industrial area, Samuels Avenue ended at a point where 23rd made an obtuse angle and veered to the northeast. Rather than a T-shaped juncture, the intersection looked like a lopsided Y. Samuels and the Santa Fe tracks narrow to less than 80 feet apart there, and traveling to the north on Samuels, the right-hand corner is a sweeping curve up a slight grade to cross the tracks. About 40 feet before this curve started, another set of tracks that belonged to the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway, or Frisco, cut diagonally to the southeast across Samuels and the Santa Fe tracks. There was neither a stop sign nor crossbucks (the X-shaped sign) nor lights and bells before the Frisco tracks for traffic coming north on Samuels Avenue. There was a single Santa Fe light post with cross bucks in the armpit of that right-hand curve, and Norman later said, “Our signal protects that [Frisco] crossing also.” That signal post had two sets of lights, or “flashers” — one that looked south down Samuels and one that pointed down 23rd Street to the west. This sat in some proximity to the signal house, a wide, tall metallic shed-like structure that housed the electronics that activated the signals. The powers-that-be relied on drivers coming up Samuels to realize that the signals they needed to look for were after the Frisco tracks they had to cross to get to 23rd. There were no gates — the red-and-white striped bars that lower automatically — at either set of tracks.
According to deposition testimony, the gas truck didn’t stop at the Frisco tracks. No one on the train could be sure whether the bells or “flashers” for either direction were working, though Moss said the set that signaled the Santa Fe tracks had been when the crew came from Saginaw earlier that morning. It’s unclear whether the set that governed the Frisco crossing would have been triggered at all since there was no train on that track. Moss said when he saw the truck start the right-hand turn on to 23rd, he realized the driver wasn’t going to stop. No one said the truck appeared to be racing the train.
There is no way to know whether Joe Parsons did or did not see the flashing lights or hear the bells from the signal or the whistle from the train. There is no way to know if the signals were working on May 29, 1980. Vernon Pickard would say that he could see Joe sitting in his cab after he began the turn and that he “never did look back up [right] to the Santa Fe tracks.” Rhonda would later vehemently argue the signals were not functioning, or Joe, with his window rolled down to listen for just this type of street noise, would have heard them. He wasn’t a careless man, she’d say. It’s also unclear how much of his view of the tracks might have been blocked by the signal house. There are no extant accident scene photos.
Either way, when Moss realized what was happening, he “hollered, ‘He is not going to stop. Big hole it’”— railway jargon for throwing the emergency brakes. Engineer John Taylor “jumped up and pulled the brake valve around, and then he started looking for an exit,” Moss said in his deposition. Moss then hit the floor, hoping the tanker was empty. Pickard tried to shut the front door of the cab as the truck came around the curve, and no one could say what Norman was doing. They were about 150 feet from the street.
Later, at trial, Rhonda would recall that one of them, she couldn’t remember which, said he caught a glimpse of Joe as he crossed the tracks, by then aware of the train, frantically trying to get the tractor-trailer in gear to give it more power. He almost made it.
The train hit the empty tank somewhere between the middle and the rear axle where it punched two small holes. There was no explosion. As it slowed, the train pushed the truck down the tracks, then off to the right side so it ended up parallel to the train. As the rig swung around, Joe flung open his door and apparently tried to bail out. Then the truck rolled.
Even before train came to a full stop, three of crew climbed down from their cab and hit the ground running, fearing the truck could still explode at any moment. Moss stayed in the cab long enough to make a mayday call, and then he headed to the Samuels/23rd Street intersection to flag traffic away from the wreck; the train completely blocked 23rd. Pickard, Norman, and Taylor made a beeline for a nearby cold storage facility. Time shifts in one’s brain in funny ways during stress. Pickard recalled that they stood away from the wreck for two or three minutes. Norman thought it was around 10 minutes. When they were confident that the tanker wasn’t going to blow sky high, Taylor “ran” to see if the driver of the truck was all right. The two other men followed but held back. According to Pickard’s deposition, Taylor looked inside the truck, turned around, and shook his head.
Medical investigator Dave Carpenter told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter covering the accident that the 35-year-old “Parsons was crushed beneath the cab.”
Rachel Parsons
Rhonda Parsons today at the site of the accident
The rail industry has gotten safer. Gone are the days when a railroad acquiesced to public safety concerns by posting a single man at a crossing around the clock. (“You know damn well they didn’t have somebody 24/7 they paid to stand there at the tracks at the intersection,” says Richard Selcer, the historian.) In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the Federal Railroad Safety Act, which gave the Department of Transportation authority over rail maintenance and equipment standards. By 1980, the annual number of deaths at highway-grade crossings nationally was decreasing, if only marginally. According to a 1982 Federal Railroad Administration annual report, large railroads reported 723 “nontrespasser” deaths — the category that included Joe Parsons — at rail-highway crossings nationwide in 1980, down slightly from 779 in 1979.
In Texas in 1980, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway reported 700 casualties from accidents statewide, according to FRA records. Of these, 18 were fatalities. The month Joe Parsons died, so did four others. These deaths included railroad employees killed in on-the-job accidents, trespassers on tracks, and nontrespassers on railroad property. In 1995, Santa Fe merged with Burlington Northern to become BNSF, and in contrast, in 2019 BNSF reported 105 casualties statewide, 13 of which were fatalities. Of these, 11 involved trespassers on railroad tracks.
The 85% decrease in overall casualties is a remarkable sign of progress, but digging into the reported data, the story gets more macabre. The pattern of death for nonemployees has shifted in a dark way. In Tarrant County, of which Fort Worth is the county seat, BNSF reported two fatalities to the FRA in 2019. Both were designated as trespassers on railroad tracks. The physical orientation described of one, as the train approached, was “laying.” In Tarrant County, accidents involving people walking on or near tracks and suicide have become a more prevalent cause of death than grade crossing accidents.
Another key component of the Railroad Safety Act allocated funds to help states install or upgrade safety features like crossbucks, bells, lights, and gates at crossings. The amounts have bloomed during the past 40 years. On the national level, a Federal Highway Administration program set aside $245 million for safety upgrades for fiscal year 2020. On the local level, tracing that money can be tricky. A public records request to the Texas Department of Transportation asking for records of funding spent on any safety upgrades performed at the 23rd Street/Santa Fe crossing during the late 1970s was forwarded to the Texas attorney general’s office. As of publication, there has been no response. A spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration said the agency had no historical records related to the crossing in answer to a FOIA request.
In 2005, The New York Times reported that a former TxDOT official had signed roughly 100 affidavits on behalf of Texas railroads in the late 1990s and early 2000s that stated various crossings throughout the state had indeed received federal funds for safety upgrades between 1977 and 1981. Railroads used these statements in court to defend themselves against lawsuits where people were killed at grade crossings. In October of 2004, the former official — a teenager in 1977 — admitted that he had no firsthand knowledge of any money spent and those records no longer existed, according to the Times article.
Rhonda Parsons
Rhonda and Joe Parsons at their wedding
Rhonda Jeans Parsons v. Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company went to trial on January 23, 1984, in the federal courthouse downtown. A colleague warned Rhonda’s attorney, Harold Eisenman, that it would be difficult to beat a railroad in Fort Worth. It was “what they call a railroad town ... the odds are against you,” he said decades later. The vast majority of crossing accident cases are settled before trial. But it was, to Eisenman, “a righteous case” that needed to be tried. After all, Joe Parsons left behind a wife and two children, and the amount that Santa Fe offered to settle out of court — $80,000 — was “ridiculous,” Rhonda said. “I knew that crossing,” she said, since she’d worked on that side of town when she met Joe, “and I knew there wasn’t a bar there. And I knew the lights never worked.” Joe knew it, too, she said; all the more reason that he would have taken extra care.
I have a fragment of a memory from the courtroom. I was allowed to come for opening statements, and I hold an image of the art deco-era paneled room, the orange upholstery on the chair that I sat on with my legs sticking out, feet barely over its edge, and the judge saying something about me. I remember him gesturing at me and the words “that little girl,” though what came next is lost. The court reporter’s notes were never transcribed because there would be no appeal. The only records left in the National Archives in Fort Worth dealt with pretrial discovery, the court docket’s brief summary of day-to-day proceedings, and the depositions of Moss, Pickard, Norman, and my mother. It appears the engineer, Taylor, was never deposed. Neither the accident scene photos nor exhibit photographs were included in the archive files, nor do they exist any longer anywhere else. Memories are hazy 36 years on. Rhonda remembered the case revolving around whether lights and bells were working. Santa Fe’s lead defense attorney, Donald Herrmann, recalled that Rhonda’s “recollection is generally correct, but my recollection is, by the time the case went to the jury, the real question was whether the crossing was inadequately protected and should have had gates.” Eisenman remembered something else entirely.
Through the next four chill January days, as each side claimed the other was the negligent party, all four men who were on board engine 2051 testified. Eisenman subpoenaed each of them and “made them sit there during the entire trial.” None of them had jackets or ties, which were mandatory in federal court. Donald Herrmann “had to go out and buy ties for them.” One by one, each testified that everything at the crossing and on the train was working properly. That they’d followed protocol exactly. And that, as Herrmann remembered it, “the truck appeared to be attempting to kind of beat the train across the tracks. Which isn’t uncommon” in crossing cases, most of which never reach a courtroom.
After all these years, Eisenman can’t be sure which crew member was central to his defense. But since Eisenman made the decision not to depose him before the trial, it was likely the engineer, John Taylor, he recalled. Whoever it was, Eisenman saved him for last. “I had a pretty good idea that they were going to lie,” he later said. Each had testified that all of the safety measures that could be taken were taken on that sweaty May morning three and a half years before. The flashers, the bells, the train whistle, all were working.
But the whistle wasn’t working, Eisenman said. “They couldn’t have sounded it.” Prior to the trial, he’d dispatched his investigator, a man named Richard Fleisher, to talk to the witness. Fleisher, now in his 80s, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, but as Eisenman remembered it, the witness gave the investigator a signed, sworn statement that said not only was the train’s whistle broken, but he included a work order number for it. The crew operated the train that morning knowing the whistle was broken, Eisenman believed. It would be unheard of, a Texas attorney who’s represented railroads for 40 years and not involved with this case said, pointing to a litany of regulations that required a crew to test a train’s whistle multiple times before it’s underway. But Eisenman is convinced that it happened, no matter how rare. With the witness on the stand, Eisenman “cross examined him and made a liar out of him and all the rest of them with his statement.”
Across the courtroom, Donald Herrmann was momentarily stunned. He said that he’d had the case “dropped in my lap” two or three weeks before the trial (though court records show it was about four months before) when the original attorney, who prepped the case for years, was appointed to a judgeship and left their firm. He had no idea the witness statement existed. “There’s no question he lied,” Herrmann said, admitting that he does not remember which crew member it was, either. The question, he said, was when? “The guy had been, not because of this accident but subsequent to this accident ... disciplined and either suspended or fired,” he couldn’t remember which, but “he got really hacked off at the railroad so when the investigator came to talk to him ... I think he basically agreed to whatever the investigator told him. He signed it, then he got rehired by the railroad” which meant the witness was “emotionally torn because he had given a statement contradictory to the railroad, but he wanted his job, and so he was just in a compromised situation.” In the end, Herrmann said, he wasn’t terribly concerned with the revelation.
It turned out he didn’t need to be. The jury deliberated for about seven hours, during which time they asked to hear Taylor’s testimony in its entirety again. In the end, they found that the crossing was indeed “extra hazardous,” but that Santa Fe was not negligent for failing to have automatic gates there. They believed the train’s whistle and the crossing’s lights and bells were working properly. Santa Fe had met its lawful obligations to adequately protect the crossing.
“I could see your mom’s face drop,” Eisenman later said. He’d allowed himself to be cautiously optimistic, but Rhonda never did feel good about it. She watched one of the jurors struggle to stay awake in the afternoons, a couple of eye witnesses came across looking “trashy” on the stand, and Judge Eldon B. Mahon didn’t allow photographic evidence of the signal house’s position and its potential to block the view of the tracks into arguments. For people who’d never seen the intersection before, imagining the complexity of it was a problem. One juror turned out to be someone Rhonda didn’t know but a friend of an extended family friend. After the trial, she told the family friend if she’d been allowed to go to the intersection and see it for herself, she’d never have voted the way she did.
Eisenman was shocked. “This guy gave a statement under oath that the whistle was broken, and there was a work order,” he said. “And they operated the train anyway. And everybody, including him, sat on the witness stand and swore they blew the whistle when we had ironclad proof that the whistle wasn’t working. Juries generally don’t like liars, and that should’ve done it.”
Rachel Parsons
Joe Parsons (left) with his family
The crossing is safer today. Though it is still not what a reasonable person would call entirely safe — there’s no stop sign on 23rd for traffic coming toward Samuels and the tracks, for example — there is a stop sign at the end of Samuels Avenue. The Frisco tracks no longer exist. There are automatic gates at the Santa Fe tracks, as well as at each of the next three sets of tracks to the east that parallel Santa Fe’s. There are extra lights. The signal house is now on the north side of 23rd where there’s no chance it can obstruct the view.
Texas attorney Doug Poole, who has defended railroad companies for decades and was not involved in this case, said winning a crossing case at trial has always been extraordinarily difficult for a plaintiff to do, and that has gotten even harder in the past few years. Most public crossings do have the safety equipment required by law. Once that has been proved in court, the claim of a victim or their survivors is usually too weak to prevail.
As for my father, Joe Parsons, I will never know exactly what happened that morning. Moss, Norman, and Pickard are all dead. They retired, lived long lives, and each died within the past 15 years or so. Moss’ daughter, Marilyn Luton, told me that the accident deeply affected him, knowing that it had killed a man. I found no record of Taylor’s whereabouts. Many of the first responders on the scene are dead. The one Fort Worth Police Department officer still alive that the Star-Telegram quoted didn’t remember the wreck. The reporter is also dead. And while people still die at Texas crossings, including one accident in 2019 in San Patricio County in which three children ages 5 to 12 were killed when a Union Pacific train hit their vehicle, more do make it home at the end of the day.
