The suspect in an attempted bombing of a SunRail train died, and four people were injured in the incident west of DeLand this morning.
“The suspect was dead,” Volusia County Paramedic Ken Girlardo said.
Well, not really.
The drama on and along the railroad tracks in the SunRail corridor by Lake Beresford Park and involving dozens of federal, state and local personnel, was an exercise. The practice drill simulated responses by police, emergency medical units, transportation safety and emergency management personnel.
“Everything from the bomb squad participation went very well,” SunRail Chief Safety Officer Ken Glover said, moments after the two-hour drill had ended. “I think everybody got to participate.”
Glover added an actual life-threatening situation would likely take longer — maybe hours — as negotiators with the Volusia County Sheriff’s Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT) would seek to establish contact with a live suspect and try to talk him/her out of escalating the threat.
The event was a precursor to the addition of SunRail service from and to DeLand and the opening of the DeLand SunRail depot, both of which will be sometime this summer, according to the Florida Department of Transportation.
“We have to be prepared because of regulations that require it, and we have to protect our people,” FDOT District 5 Secretary John Tyler said.
Tyler was on hand for the exercise and the after-action briefing. The briefing was closed to the news media.
The emergency exercise was created at the request of SunRail and the Florida Department of Transportation to test and evaluate how first responders would deal with a crisis that could endanger human lives. The scenario developed from the following make-believe and prepare-for circumstances:
“On May 01, 2024, at approximately 0945 hours, CFRC [Central Florida Rail Corridor]/SunRail customer service received a telephone call. The individual is calm and matter of fact. He starts off with ‘Hello, how is your day.’ He then instructs the customer service representative to ‘Listen carefully’ and goes on to explain how, ‘My brother was struck and killed by your train near Lake Beresford Park. SunRail did nothing for him and the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office and the Medical Examiner’s Office ruled it an accidental death. He didn’t deserve to die at the hands of you people. I am so angry at every one of you! You are all responsible — each of you. To avenge my brother, I placed a bomb inside the pedestrian tunnel at Lake Beresford Park and it’s going to explode as the train crosses over the pedestrian tunnel’. The individual then said “I will be on the DeLand train this morning with a bomb and I am going to blow it up’ at which time the phone call ended.”
From that initial story of a bomb threat followed a quick-moving set of calls and social-media posts and a chain of events that caused the Sheriff’s Office’s SWAT team to scramble and take up positions in woods on the east side of the tracks. The agency’s bomb squad also responds.
As the SWAT team prepared to advance to the stopped train, three loud explosions could be heard, but no explanation was available.
The engineer aboard the train made an emergency stop “approximately 400 feet south of the pedestrian tunnel at Lake Beresford Park, while a conductor urges the passengers to ‘remain calm and follow their instructions.’
Other agencies descended upon the scene to provide support, including the Volusia County Fire Rescue, the DeLand and Orange City Police and Fire departments, the Florida Highway Patrol, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the federal Transportation Security Administration and Amtrak.
The story continues to the discovery of a suspicious something inside the pedestrian bridge under the railroad tracks and the presence of “a male wearing oversized dark clothing seated in the right rear seat of the coach car with a black backpack.”
The engineer and conductor evacuate the passengers from the stopped train, asking them to move into the park. At that point the suspicious rider refused to leave and threatened others with a machete, vowing he is “going to die on the train and avenge my brother.”
In the midst of the tense situation, an elderly male rider collapsed from “an apparent heart attack.” The conductor used CPR to revive the victim, but the emergency measure was not enough to save him.
The bomb retrieved from the underpass by a robot was subsequently rendered harmless and removed from the scene, but the attempted-bombing suspect barricaded himself aboard the train and refused to negotiate. A shootout ensued, and the suspect died. Both the heart-attack victim and the suspect were declared dead at the scene.
While the Sheriff’s Office and the FDLE processed the train and the vicinity nearby as a crime scene, the FBI, FDLE and the TSA participated in the investigation, or perhaps more accurately, the wrap-up briefing and lessons-learned session. That latter session between SunRail officials and the first responders was closed to the news media.
