DC Metro Crash Lawsuit Filed Over Death of Passenger

A wrongful death lawsuit has been filed in connection with the fatal DC Metro crash late last month, which killed nine people and injured 80 more.

The complaint was filed on June 29 in D.C. Superior Court, by the family of one of the passengers who died in the subway accident, 29-year-old Veronica DuBose. The family is seeking $25 million in damages for the death of DuBose, who was the mother of a 7-year-old and 20-month-old.

The DC Metro crash occurred on June 22, 2009, when a train on the subway’s Red Line slammed in to the back of another train shortly after 5 p.m., just outside of the Fort Totten Station. The rear train was travelling fast enough that the front car was propelled into the air and crashed onto the back of the front train. Many people were ejected from the rear train upon impact.

Investigators have said that it appears the rear train’s operator, Jeanice McMillan, tried using the emergency brake to prevent the crash. The train was under computer control at the time of the accident.

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators and transit officials are still looking into causes of the crash. On Wednesday, officials announced that a device replaced five days before the crash was found to be faulty. The device was part of the Red Line’s crash avoidance system. Officials say that a circuit in the crash area began intermittently losing its ability to detect trains after the device was replaced, but the problem was not uncovered until after the accident.

The device is called a Wee-Z bond, and helps maintain a safe distance between trains. It would occasionally lose its ability to detect trains, but officials say the malfunctions happened so quickly and briefly that controllers would not have detected it in the Metro operations center.

Neither NTSB investigators nor officials from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) will say whether the malfunction was the cause of the crash. The entire system is now being checked to see if there are similar malfunctions elsewhere.

The DC Metro crash lawsuit includes as defendants both WMATA and Alstom Signaling, Inc. which was involved in the computer control systems for the trains.