Ernestina Pais died on Friday after a Tren de la Costa train struck her Honda City at a level crossing in San Isidro. She was 54. The impact hit the driver’s side of the car at 19:25, and she died at the scene.
That is the blunt fact now driving the search for answers: a fatal crash at a crossing where the barrier was down. Pais tried to cross at Sáenz Peña and El Cano, and the municipality of San Isidro said the barrier was down when the car passed. Sources said the barrier and the fonoluminescent signaling system were working correctly at the time.
The collision left firefighters, forensic specialists and police officers working at the scene while Fiscal María Paula Hertrig took charge of the case. Her office ordered security cameras in the area to be reviewed, and the body will be subjected to an autopsy and toxicological tests. Those steps are meant to show what happened in the seconds before the train hit the car, and whether anything beyond the moving train and the crossing controls helps explain why the vehicle was still in the path of the impact.
The crash also revived attention to Pais herself. In March of this year, she crashed the same Honda City in Vicente López and refused to take an alcohol test after that accident, which caused only material damage. She had also spoken publicly about a problem with alcohol consumption and said on Mirtha Legrand's program that she had been more than one year without drinking alcohol, adding: “Fue una situación delicada, pero hoy me lleva a transmitir básicamente esto: se puede.”
Pais was known in Argentina as a journalist, television host and radio host, and she became widely popular on Mañanas Informales with Jorge Guinzburg. Her death now turns a road-and-rail collision into a case about timing, crossing safety and the final minutes before a car was hit at a place where the warning system was supposed to be working. The next answers will come from the cameras, the autopsy and the toxicology results.
