While some families sought information on loved ones aboard a Metro-North train that derailed Sunday, leaving four people dead, others were already at local hospitals where the injured were taken.
Authorities said more than 60 people were injured, 11 critically, when four cars on the seven-car 5:54 a.m. train from Poughkeepsie derailed at about 7:20 a.m., just feet from the Harlem River as the train was rounding a curve about 100 yards north of the Spuyten Duyvil station.
At a family center established at John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx, officials said six families had been assisted and some reunited with their loved ones.
One woman at the family center who was looking for her cousin said official instructions of where family members should gather had been confusing.
"Everyone is telling us different places to go for information," said Bonnie Garfinkel, who wasn't sure whether her cousin had been on the train. "So more frustrated then anything."
At Saint Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, one of four hospitals where victims were sent, 12 victims were being treated. Among those patients two were in critical condition, a 21-year-old woman with an open leg fracture and a 43-year-old man with a spinal cord injury.
An off-duty NYPD officer in stable condition was among the injured at the hospital, officials said. Four other off-duty NYPD officers were believed to have been on the train, though they were not seriously injured.
A 14-year-old boy was also one of the victims taken to Saint Barnabas. Officials said he only suffered bruises and was expected to leave the hospital with his father Sunday.
At NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in Upper Manhattan, 14 victims were being treated, four of which were said to be in critical condition.
William Herbert arrived at the hospital early Sunday afternoon to see his wife Maria, an assistant conductor on the train, who suffered various injuries to her ribs, head and shoulders.
"Thank God she's alive and thank God a lot of people lived through that because if that train went in the water that would have been it," Herbert said.
Lisa Delgado was at the hospital visiting her cousin, Sherelle Coore, a 19-year-old college student from the Bronx who was aboard the train when it derailed.
"The train was going very fast and that was the thought that was going through her head," Delgado said, relaying what her cousin had told her. "Then she felt a jerking movement and that's when everything happened very, very quickly. She hit the side of her head. She saw the woman in front of her go out the other window. Her glass broke and she hung onto the side rails like a monkey while the train was flipping and the rocks were coming in."
Photo Credit: AP