Malakwa-area man killed when CP train hits car; unanswered questions

MALAKWA – A nightmare scenario for three people in a car which was stuck on the tracks in Malakwa Saturday night as a CP Rail train approached.

RCMP were called just after 9 p.m., March 21 about a car on the tracks just off Malakwa Road and Summerville-Husted Road, according to Const. Patrick Pyper in a phone interview.

Pyper says the three people in the Chrysler somehow got hung up on the railway tracks.

“They exited the vehicle and the vehicle was then struck by a westbound CP Rail train,” he says. Somehow one of the occupants, a 62-year-old Malakwa-area man, was also hit by the train. He was pronounced dead at the scene, he says.

“Everybody had gotten out of the car and for some reason this gentleman didn’t clear himself, get himself far enough away from the train when it came through,” Pyper says. “We’re still trying to figure out what happened.”

The RCMP along with the CP Police and the B.C. Coroners Service are investigating.

The driver and the other passenger, both women in their late 50s or early 60s, were not hurt, Pyper says. They were taken to hospital in Salmon Arm as a precaution, checked over and released.

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To contact the reporter for this story, email Howard Alexander at halexander@infonews.ca or call 250-491-0331. To contact the editor, email mjones@infonews.ca or call 250-718-2724.

— This story was updated at 10:16 a.m., Monday, March 23, 2015 to correct the name of Summerville-Husted Road.