Sources say the Amtrak engineer at the helm when his train hurtled off the tracks at 107 mph -- killing at least seven and injuring hundreds -- has lawyered up and is refusing to cooperate with investigators.
The unidentified man and his attorney allegedly clashed with police this morning, leaving a Philadelphia precinct in a huff nearly a day after the deadly derailment occurred just outside city limits.
His name has not been released yet, but many are speculating the catastrophic Amtrak derailment was in fact the result of speed and human error. Especially since the stretch of railway where it occurred had just been inspected earlier that same day and found to have no defects.
Witnesses to the massive crash site of the locomotive which the unknown Amtrak conductor was supposedly in control of described a scene of mangled machinery, bloody human beings and utter chaos, in one of the worst train disasters on record.
Today, as first responders continue to probe the wreckage for more missing or dead, investigators are attempting to process the debris field piece by piece, for clues as to what or who caused the deadly accident.
However, minutes before the speeding train dramatically lurched to one side at a hairpin curve and jumped the tracks, some survivors say they were already expecting the worse, and are thankful to be alive.
All of the cars were either crushed or significantly damaged in the derailment, but a 27-year-old passenger who was seated in the second one said that moments before the train flew off the tracks she could feel it “was going fast enough for me to be worried."
The woman was thrown across the car and luckily only sustained relatively minor injuries in her tumble, while others nearby were seriously maimed or even killed in the crash.
So officials can now thoroughly scour that scene of devastation, Philly’s mayor has closed the busy Amtrak route that nearly 12-million people per year use to travel from Washington through Philadelphia and onward.
Even a temporary closure will cause major disruptions for the thousands of daily travelers who solely rely on this mode of transportation to get to work, but despite that looming dilemma, the mayor unapologetically stated, "There's no circumstance under which there would be any Amtrak service this week through Philadelphia."
