A Metro-North employee who was paralyzed in the train derailment in the Bronx late last year is suing the agency for $100 million.
“He is a quadriplegic,” lawyer Gregory Cannata said of his client, Samuel Rivera. “He does not have use of his fingers. He has some use of his wrists, he can move his elbows and shoulders, but he can’t move his legs at all.”
The 43-year-old Metro-North employee was off-duty on Dec. 1, 2013 and en route from Ossining, N.Y., to Grand Central Terminal with his 14-year-old son to spend the day in Manhattan. The speeding train flew off the tracks at a sharp curve near the Spuyten Duyvil station, killing four and injuring 70. The engineer has said he nodded off as the train approached the curve.
Rivera’s son, also named Samuel, suffered a sprain and some minor cuts and bruises – and the horror of seeing his father after his spine fractured and his spinal cord was crushed.
“This has devastated the family,” Cannata said.
Rivera and his wife Jessica, a teacher’s aide, also have a two-year-old.
The suit was filed on Monday and seeks what Cannata acknowledged was an “extraordinary sum of money” because the family is going to need it.
“It’s an extraordinary injury and he has extraordinary medical needs” that will cost at least hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, Cannata said.
“He needs 24-hour-a-day care, someone to turn him, feed him and bathe him,” Cannata said.
The suit is actually the second to be filed in Bronx Supreme Court pertaining to the accident, which claimed four lives and sent 59 others to area hospitals.
On Friday, newly retired NYPD veteran Eddie Russell became the first to file suit over the fatal crash. His suit requests $10 million and charges it was Metro-North’s negligence that led to the disaster.
Russell’s lawyer, Robert Vilensky, cited a recent federal review of the embattled railroad that found the agency had “emphasized on-time performance to the detriment of safe operations and adequate maintenance of its infrastructure.”
Russell told the Daily News that “safety should have been the most important thing.”
The 22-year NYPD vet said he’d already put in his papers to retire before the accident, and was “on vacation” when he boarded the doomed train. His head, back and neck were injured in the crash.
He’s been able to do part-time work, but hopes he’ll recover enough to get a new full-time job at some point.
“It’s going to happen,” he said. “I’ve always worked a full-time job. This is totally different for me.”
His suit names the train engineer, William Rockefeller, as a defendant. The feds say Rockefeller has sleep apnea and “dozed off” while the train was approaching the curve at a high rate of speed. He also had cold medicine in his system, something he initially denied when questioned by investigators.
Rivera’s suit intentionally does not name Rockefeller as a defendant. Cannata said his client, who’d been working for Metro-North as a mechanic, didn’t want to go after a co-worker.
“He has no animosity towards Mr. Rockefeller,” Cannata said. “He realizes his life has been ruined also.”
A rep for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the railroad’s parent company, said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
With Ben Chapman
dgregorian@nydailynews.com
