An Alabama father described the terrifying moment he saw his two kids and four other children crawl underneath a train after being told by the conductor to do so.
The incident happened at a train track crossing near a school bus stop in Mardisville on Nov. 5, WVTM reported.
Leon Estelle said he and several other parents were waiting on the other side of the tracks that day for their kids when a train stopped.
When the bus arrived, the driver let the kids off.
The parents thought they’d have to wait for the train to move before the kids could cross the tracks until they saw the kids crawling under the train.
“I seen kids pop up from under the train, I’m like, ‘I know y’all ain’t coming up from under that train.’ And they were like, ‘He told us to do it.’ So I’m like, ‘Who is he?’ And he popped up like in between, you know, like ‘I’m sorry. I told them, go up under the train’ and everything,” Leon Estelle recounted.
Estelle said the conductor was the one who instructed the young children to crawl under the train instead of waiting for it to move.
One woman said she was shocked the conductor would tell the kids, including her 6-year-old granddaughter, to do that.
“And what if that train had moved, and that thing would’ve killed my kids. That would have been real bad and real ugly,” Willie Bell Fuller remarked.
The children also recalled how afraid they were during the incident.
“I thought it was going to start moving. I was scared,” one child said. “I thought something wrong was happening ’cause I never experienced that before.”
“It was so scary,” another child added. “I never been under a train before.”
Estelle works for a railroad company and said that railroad workers should be aware of the risks associated with doing something that dangerous.
“It can be just slack roll and not even, you know, for any reason, any kind of movement, any one of them could’ve been killed or hurt. That’s never OK going up under a train; that is a serious problem,” Estelle said.
News of the incident went viral online and drew backlash from many people.
“As a former train conductor we aren’t even supposed to go under wtf 🤦🏾♂️,” one person wrote.
“Bus driver shouldn’t have let kids off the bus and train conductor shouldn’t have told them it was safe to crawl under train. Insanity. Parents have every right to be upset,” someone else commented.
Some people suggested the kids weren’t in danger since the conductor had stopped the train.
“The conductor would know if the train was getting ready to move. This is not a big deal,” one comment read.
“He ‘the train conductor’ wouldn’t have told them to go under it, IF HE wasn’t planning on moving it. What’s the problem?” another commenter added.
Others took issue with the location of the bus stop.
“So a lot of y’all missed the fact that this was the bus stop everyday.. today it was a train there blocking them from getting across, bus does not take them across. The parents were on the other side of the train!” one person wrote.
School district officials have placed the bus driver on administrative leave.
