A 3-year-old child struck by a train near Emily Street in Springfield on Wednesday evening later died from her injuries at Baystate Medical Center, turning what began as a rescue response into a fatal police investigation.

Springfield police said officers responded around 6:15 p.m. to the 0-100 block of Emily Street after a report that a toddler had been hit by a train. The child was taken to Baystate Medical Center, where she died later that evening.

The death is drawing immediate attention because the child was only 3 years old and the circumstances that put her in the path of the train remain unanswered. The Springfield Police Department Detective Bureau is handling the case, and the question of how she came to be there has not been explained.

That gap is where the investigation now sits. Western Mass News reached out to Amtrak Police and had not yet heard back, leaving city police as the only agency publicly identified in the response so far. The incident happened near Emily Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, and it adds to the hard reality of a train strike that ended in a child’s death before investigators could piece together the full chain of events.

For now, the next step is the detective bureau investigation, which will have to answer the most basic question in the case: how a toddler ended up in the path of a train on a Wednesday evening in Springfield.