Today I’m going to post an old case of a woman who went missing from a mental hospital in the nineties. The NamUs file mentions her foot was “partially amputated,” whatever the heck that means. Well, when I put her name into my newspaper archives I found some articles about her from a few years before she went missing. She mooned (!) a train and got hit. She wasn’t seriously harmed compared to most people who get run over by trains, but they did have to amputate some of her toes. That is a lot clearer than “partially amputated foot,” and so that detail is going in her casefile.
Of course, this kind of behavior explains her court-ordered committal to a mental hospital, much more than any simple diagnosis ever could. Can we say “danger to self and others”?
The Charley Project Blog 
This is the first time I have ever heard of a person being hit by a train who wasn’t instantly killed.
I’m guessing she dived out of the way at the last second, and only her feet got caught under the wheels.
One of my former students was hit by a train April of last year. No one is really sure why he was near the tracks, it was late and he was alone, walking home from a bar, but he was not intoxicated, as witnesses and blood tests proved. We were certain he would die: massive internal injuries, head injury, major leg injuries, and he lost all the fingers on one hand. It was truly minute-by-minute for the first few weeks of his hospitalization.
Miraculously, not only did he survive but he made a full recovery and walked down the aisle in his brother’s wedding last summer. He is now back at college and last I heard still pulling a 4.0 and aiming to be a physical therapist.
Sorry to divert from the topic, though.
Maybe he got inspired for the physical therapy career by his own experience? I’m sure he had to go through a lot of physical therapy himself. He sounds like a medical miracle though.
It’s amazing what modern medicine can do. I read an article once that suggested the drop in America’s homicide rate during the last decade might be attributed to medical advances — people make it to the hospital and they don’t die, so the murders turn out to be just attempted murders.
When I was a kid one of my friends was hit by a train. SHe was being chased by a group of bullies. It severed he leg mid thigh and they were actually able to re-attach it. She made a full recovery. This was around 1978 or ’79- Long Island NY. It was a huge news story
Well now I just heard two more stories of a person getting hit by a train without getting killed. Now you see? You come here and you learn stuff.