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'Gone In The Blink Of An Eye'

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By JAN HOLLINGSWORTH and BUDDY JAUDON, The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 6, 2007

Updated: 10/04/2007 07:23 pm

PLANT CITY - For some reason, Marilyn Roberge went to church 'for the first time in a long time' on Oct. 2, 1977. According to the Rev. A.W. Kitchens, who would preside over her funeral, the young mother of two wept when he invited worshippers to renew their faith that day.

Less than 12 hours later, Roberge and nine others - four of them younger than 9 - were killed in what may have been the deadliest train-pickup wreck in state history.

Roberge, 28, was driving.

Thirty years have passed since a six-car Amtrak train slammed into a green truck at the railroad crossing at State Road 574 and Turkey Creek Road.

Those who witnessed the catastrophic crash and its aftermath will never forget it. Neither will the tiny Pasco County community of Clay Sink, which committed six of the victims - three generations of one family - to the hallowed ground beside a little-known Baptist church in the woods north of Dade City.

'The saddest thing was seeing those six hearses pulling into the cemetery, one right after the other,' said Vera Boyett, 91, matriarch of one of Clay Sink's founding families.

Funeral director Paul Rhinesmith was waiting at Clay Sink with a load of flowers when the hearses arrived.

Rhinesmith, now retired from Coleman and Ferguson Funeral Homes, tended to all 10 victims of the train, which hit the truck broadside and dragged it half a mile down the tracks as it exploded into flames.

It was not the first time the mortician had been presented with such a task. However, it was perhaps the most memorable.

'There have been multiple deaths in the past, but not to this magnitude,' he said.

Rhinesmith photographed the 50-car procession as it made its way up the dirt road, across the cattle guards and into the little cemetery.

There, not far from a sprawling grandfather oak, a backhoe had slashed a trench in the earth large enough to accommodate Roberge, her children - David, 8, and Michael, 3 - her mother Martha Loree Williams, 46, and Williams' 8-year-old twins, George and Marsha.

Robbie Graham was about the same age as Roberge when she and a friend happened upon the funeral that day. When it was over, she noticed the tops of the vaults that held the caskets - two large and four so very small - protruding from the grave.

'We took shovels and covered the tops,' she said. It seemed the right thing to do. 'Out here, we're all considered family.'

Founded in 1894, Clay Sink is the second oldest cemetery in Pasco County. Burial here is reserved for descendents of the community's founding families. Boyd is one of them.

When Maggie Boyd lost her only daughter, Williams, granddaughter, Roberge, and their four children on a dark stretch of track in Plant City, there was no doubt where she would put them to rest.

'Maggie belonged to the Church of God in Dade City, but she never missed a cemetery work day out here,' Boyett said.

Maggie Boyd died in 1984. She and her husband are buried a few paces from the six graves.

Roberge's sister, Katrinka Rollins, known as 'Kay' to friends and family, has reserved two plots nearby for herself and her husband.

Rollins, who serves as secretary of the Clay Sink Cemetery Association, was 22 when she lost her mother, sister, twin half-siblings and nephews.

'You always wonder, 'What if?', but you just learn to deal with it,' she said. 'You can go crazy and mad, or you can move on with life. That's just something I learned from my grandmother.'

Thirty years later, though, the memory of this horrific chapter of her history still brims with unbidden tears.

Rollins was home watching television that night when news of the carnage in Plant City flashed across the screen.

'I told my husband, 'That family's gonna be hurting - not realizing it was ours,' she said.

It was not until the next day, after newspapers printed her mother's name as one of the victims, that next of kin received the news via community grapevine.

Rollins preferred not to know the particulars of the crash, which drew several hundred bystanders to the scene that night. Although three decades have passed, many of the circumstances remain a mystery to her.

She does not know who the four men were who died in the truck with her family.

Police say Charles Inman, 42, owned the truck Roberge was driving. According to witnesses, he and the six family members had spent the afternoon at Williams' home in Dade City, along with a Plant City woman and her young daughter.

That evening, the group piled into Inman's pickup and took the woman and her daughter home to a trailer park off State Road 60 in Plant City. The woman would later tell authorities that Roberge, who had consumed at least a half dozen beers that afternoon, was driving.

At some point - no one can say when - three more young men joined the group in the back of the truck.

Albert Bradshaw, 22, Pineda Fortino, 25, and Presitiano Maldonado, 21, who worked as laborers and citrus pickers, rode with the children beneath the camper shell on the truck bed. The trio, like the rest of the truck's occupants, lived in Dade City.

Perhaps they were acquainted with someone in the truck. Or maybe they were just catching a ride home from Plant City.

'I have no idea who those men were,' Rollins said.

The circumstances of the crash also are murky.

Witnesses in a car that followed the doomed truck northbound on Turkey Creek Road report seeing the reverse lights of the truck as it stopped at the tracks and started to back up. There was a train, a crash and the truck lights disappeared, they said - both train and truck 'gone in the blink of an eye.'

Engineer Peter Medley, however, said he never saw the truck stop or slow down as the Amtrak Floridian streaked westward on the last leg of its Chicago to St. Petersburg run at 8:25 p.m.

He said he did 'everything in my power' to stop the train, which was traveling 70 mph, 9 mph slower than the maximum allowable speed.

None of the train's crew or its 30 passengers were injured.

'God just put us both in the same place at the same time,' said Medley, who lives in Georgia and prefers not to revisit memories of the accident.

On Dec. 27, 1978, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a report that said Roberge's blood alcohol level, at 0.14, indicated she was driving under the influence of alcohol.

The truck was traveling at 50 mph in a 45-mph zone. The crossing was equipped with red flashing signals, but no barrier gates

The report went on to say the train wasn't visible until the truck passed a stand of trees 400 feet south of the grade crossing.

'At that point the train was 559 feet from the crossing. There was no way the train could stop,' the report said. 'The pickup truck could have stopped short of the crossing after the train became visible, but there was no time available for hesitation on the part of the driver.'

Rollins spends little time contemplating the few seconds that brought an end to life as she knew it.

'I don't like to live in the past,' she said. 'I live for today because tomorrow may never come.'

Reporter Jan Hollingsworth can be reached at (813) 865-4436. Buddy Jaudon can be reached at (813) 259-7965.

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