Jury finds LIRR negligent in fatal Brentwood crash, pays family $2.9M

Just months after Blanca Maldonado and her father, Jose Adolfo Reyes, were killed by a train while driving through a Brentwood grade crossing, the LIRR featured an image of the fiery crash in a public service advertisement. The video cast the incident as the result of the "very bad decision" to drive around lowered safety gates.

Luis Maldonado, of Commack, didn't believe the authorities' contention that his wife drove around lowered safety gates at the crossing. Having his wife made to be the poster child for irresponsible driving, while he and his children were still mourning her loss, was "the worst thing."

"They said that they were trying to send a message to the public," Maldonado said. "I never believed that. I always thought that the gates didn't go down."

Now Maldonado believes his wife's good name has been restored. The Long Island Rail Road reached a $2.9 million settlement with the family after a Riverhead jury found the railroad negligent in the Jan. 22, 2013, crash, according to lawyers for the family.

While declining to comment on the litigation, Aaron Donovan, spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — the LIRR’s parent organization — maintained that the grade crossing safety system "was operating properly" at the time of the crash.

For the family, the verdict and settlement were vindication.

"All my kids were so happy," Maldonado said. "They knew that she didn’t do what they say that she did." 

On way to appointment

Blanca Maldonado, 45, had just picked up her 74-year-old father at the Brentwood LIRR station and were on their way to an appointment when their 2010 Nissan Maxima was crushed by an eastbound train while driving through a 2nd Street grade crossing.

The train, moving around 74 miles per hour, caused the car to erupt in a fireball that burned the father and daughter pair so badly that it took days for a medical examiner to identify the victims using dental records, according to authorities.

From the outset, MTA Police, which led the investigation, maintained that the safety gates at the crossing had lowered ahead of the passing train, and Maldonado must have driven around them. But that story never sat well with Maldonado’s family, who knew her to be a "very cautious woman," according to her husband, and believed the safety gates must have malfunctioned on an especially frigid winter morning.

In a two-week trial, the LIRR relied on the testimony of two eyewitnesses — the locomotive engineer of the train, which was not carrying any passengers, and a pedestrian who said she saw Maldonado’s car drive around the gates. But the Maldonado family’s attorneys argued that the train operator may not have had the proper vantage point, and questioned the credibility of the other witness, who also maintained that Reyes was behind the wheel.

Through police records, the plaintiffs’ attorneys found an eyewitness of their own — the motorist who was driving just behind Maldonado and, in a 911 call reporting the crash, said the safety gates never came down.

"They just came up to a crossing ... The gates were up. No lights were on. The bells weren’t ringing. And they proceeded slowly. And this woman behind them saw the whole thing," the family’s Garden City attorney, Christopher Dean, said in an interview.

Maldonado’s lawyers said MTA Police — which, like the LIRR, are a subsidiary of the MTA — did not follow up with the witness and lost the audio recording and transcript of the 911 call.

The LIRR also pointed to data on an event recorder at the crossing that they said showed the gates lowered as they were supposed to. But the attorneys for the victims’ family noted the event recorder at the crossing showed that, after coming down, the gates returned to their upright position just before 10:53 a.m. — nearly a minute before a separate "black box" on the train documented it went through the crossing.

Dean said the evidence points to a grade crossing "activation failure," which occurs when the passage of a trains’ wheels over a trigger point some distance before an intersection fails to send the electrical relay that activates the safety mechanism at the crossing.

In his statement, Donovan, the MTA spokesperson, said "retrieved data demonstrated the grade crossing was operating properly at the time of this incident."

The Suffolk County jury sided with the family and found that the LIRR was negligent, according to a transcript of the March 23 verdict.

Grade crossings regularly inspected

Donovan said all the LIRR’s 282 grade crossings "meet or exceed regulatory requirements and are regularly inspected to ensure they are safe and operate as intended."

Grade crossings have been a persistent vulnerability for the LIRR over its nearly 200 year history.

Long Island accounted for one-third of the 33 grade crossing incidents in the state last year, according to the Federal Railroad Administration, which defines an incident as any contact between a train and a "highway user," including vehicles and pedestrians. The seven incidents in Suffolk and four in Nassau resulted in seven injuries and four deaths. In the first three months of 2026, the LIRR saw two grade crossing incidents, resulting in two injuries and one death.

Railroad president Rob Free on Wednesday said the LIRR performs regular inspections of crossing and has standards that meet or exceed regulatory requirements. "We go above and beyond. We make sure all of our crossings are safe," Free said.

Since the death of Maldonado and her father, the LIRR has put in place several new safety measures, including front-facing cameras on trains and at crossings, and vertical, flexible "delineators" to keep cars from accidentally turning onto tracks at crossings. The LIRR also has worked with Waze, the Google-owned navigation app, to integrate safety alerts about crossings and LIRR rights of way into its GPS technology.

Still, Luis Maldonado said he tries to avoid either riding on the LIRR or driving through its crossings, both out of his own safety concerns and over the lingering resentment that the railroad blamed his wife for the crash. Maldonado said he and his children are grateful that the jury corrected the record.

"It was a relief for all of us," he said.