13-year old boy dies while vandalizing railroad property... family sues...
Anyone else think this is complete bullshit? Your asshole son was both trespassing and vandalizing railroad property, gets killed by his own fault, and now you have the audacity to sue every agency you can think of and make us taxpayers liable for it?
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http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/486520p-409531c.html
Boy's kin blame LIRR
Plan to sue, says friend
BY JOHN LAUINGER and ADAM LISBERG
DAILY NEWS WRITERS
The grieving family of a 13-year-old Queens boy struck and killed by a commuter train blamed the Long Island Rail Road yesterday for his death, saying it should have done more to block access to the tracks.
Ari Kraft was spray-painting graffiti on signal equipment with friends at 5:40 p.m. Friday when he dashed across LIRR tracks near his Rego Park home Friday night, sources said.
He narrowly beat an oncoming train on the third of four tracks he had to cross, but that train blocked his view of another train approaching on the fourth track, sources said.
"My son was the most wonderful kid in the world," his father, Roger Kraft, a computer programmer, said yesterday. "I just want to be left alone to mourn my son."
Family friend and attorney Daniella Levi said the family plans to sue the MTA, the LIRR and New York City once it finishes sitting shiva for the boy.
"It's a terrible loss and tragedy, a loss that should have been prevented had the railroad safeguarded the track," Levi said. "He had a lot of dreams and hopes, like any other teenager. We want to make sure that no other family goes through something like this."
LIRR spokeswoman Susan McGowan said the railroad was still investigating how Ari got onto the tracks. She said the railroad tries to block access to its 700 miles of tracks.
Ari was an eighth-grader at Solomon Schechter School of Queens, where his Israeli-born mother, Yaffa Simantov, works as a secretary.
"It's the biggest tragedy there could be," Ari's neighbor Zima Fridman, 42, said of the boy's death. "I couldn't sleep at all last night."
Ari hoped to attend The Bronx High School of Science or Stuyvesant High School this fall. He used the graffiti tag "Kos" and may have taken pictures of his work just before he died, sources said. MTA police recovered a cell phone at the scene and were checking if it had pictures by Ari or his friends.
Friends said Ari was heading home for Sabbath dinner when he was killed. MTA Police Chief Kevin McConville said trains typically run slightly slower than the 40 mph speed limit on that stretch of track.
"Our heart goes out to the family, and to the engineer, who's very upset by this," he said. "The engineer did everything in his power to try to avoid it."