A mother who lost her son after he accidentally fell off the platform at the Stadium-Chinatown SkyTrain station is now calling on TransLink to improve safety measures at the stations.
Kathryn Cunningham’s 34-year-old son, Julian, fell backward off the platform on Saturday morning and was killed.
“My son has had a life of pain and loss and mental health and overdose and he made it through all of that,” Cunningham said.
“The thing that ended his life after 18 years on the streets and being lost in his mind and homeless, is going like this too far,” she added, backing up a few steps to show how her son fell.
Cunningham said she was in the park on Saturday morning when she found out about her son’s accident.
She rushed to the ICU to see him. “He had almost no brain activity,” she said.
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“I was able to hold him and say goodbye.”
Cunningham said SkyTrain stations can be very busy and the risk of an accident is too great. She would like to see protective barriers at stops to prevent the type of incidents that took her son’s life.
In a statement to Global News, TransLink said it, along with the British Columbia Rapid Transit Company, is executing a study that will consider a “wide range of options to limit track intrusion” on the system, including platform screen doors.
“This study is called the Trackway Intrusion Engineering Study and includes evaluating new and emerging technologies used in other transit systems around the world,” a spokesperson said.
“Platform screen doors are often discussed in these contexts. However, they are not currently feasible on the existing SkyTrain system due to varying door alignments across train models and station design limitations.”
The study is not projected to be finished until 2027 and it will guide a long-term strategy to improve guideway safety, according to TransLink.
“You shouldn’t have to bury your children, it’s not right,” Cunningham said.
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