Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 11, 1993 TAG: 9304110021
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS PARDUE and LON WAGNER STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
`I JUST KIND OF PUT MYSELF IN HER SPOT'
COPYING A SECRET MEMO cost Patricia Nixon her job and a chance to own a house. Why did she do it? Out of sympathy for the mother of a train accident victim, she says.
Patricia Nixon is not certain why the plight of Patricia Johnson moved her so much.
She heard about the Norfolk Southern train accident that paralyzed Johnson's daughter through office gossip.
Then she saw a file on the Virginia case in the railway's bridges and structures office in Atlanta, where she worked as a clerk-stenographer. She couldn't help but read the letters, documents and internal memos.
It troubled her how Johnson's teen-age daughter fell from a high trestle near Farmville in 1989 while trying to escape an onrushing train.
When Nixon saw the memo from Wiley F. Mitchell Jr., the railway's top attorney, she knew she needed to do something. Hidden in the memo's legal jargon, Nixon saw a callous decision by the railroad to put money before lives.
She called Patricia Johnson.
"I wanted first to find out if her daughter was still alive," says Nixon, 44. "I had read that she was paralyzed, but not expected to live. That was another thing that struck me - that woman was a mother. I just kind of put myself in her spot."
Nixon didn't identify herself, except to say she worked with the railway and felt bad about what had happened.
She also decided to send Johnson a copy of the memo, and urged Johnson not to say where it came from.
That was four years ago. She heard nothing more from Johnson or about the memo until a few months ago, when railway detectives closed in on her.
The railway had suspected for several years that an internal memo had been leaked. They kept hearing about it from Bill Wilson, a Covington lawyer who had represented Johnson and others injured or killed in railway trestle accidents.
"I know that Bill Wilson mentioned that he had access to some of our private correspondence some time ago when we were talking about another case," Mitchell says.
The railway didn't know which document had been leaked until late last year, when Wilson filed a copy of Mitchell's memo with a lawsuit over the deaths of two boys killed on a trestle near Martinsville.
"Once we got the material, we knew exactly where it came from," Mitchell says. But it took railway detectives a couple of months to pin the leak on Nixon.
The railway fired her in February.
Norfolk Southern said she was "guilty of conduct unbecoming an employee." In its letter of dismissal, the railway said the memo "was publicized and used in multiple legal actions against the company."
Mitchell wrote in his memo that warning devices placed on trestles "should reduce the risk of accidents." But, he added, the railway could be subject to greater risk of liability if such devices weren't used or didn't work when an accident occurred.
The memo was written in response to a suggestion by a Norfolk Southern employee that the railway should blow whistles or install warning devices at trestles to prevent deaths and injuries.
The railway has contended that it shouldn't have to give warnings, because people who cross trestles are trespassing.
Others, such as Wilson and the mothers of the teen-agers killed in August near Martinsville, believe the railroad could save lives by making trains sound warning whistles at trestles where teen-agers are known to play. Wilson says the memo shows that the railway knows that.\
`I mailed it incognito'
On Aug. 9, 1989, nine people were on a trestle over the Appomattox River near Farmville when a Norfolk Southern train barreled across.
Five of the people ran off the bridge. Two others saved themselves by hopping onto a catwalk as the train passed.
A 22-year-old man was struck and killed.
Ann Kimberly Johnson, then 19 and a rising junior at Virginia Tech, tried to hang from a crosstie, but lost her grip and fell 100 feet.
Johnson, now 22, was paralyzed from the fall and is still in a wheelchair.
Patricia Nixon says she wasn't trying to be a hero or to get publicity: She just wanted to help Johnson and her daughter.
"I really took the kind of cowardly way," Nixon says. "I mailed it incognito - so I thought.
"I knew if it was ever found out that I would be fired."
After she was fired, Nixon called Johnson again to let her know what happened to her. She also learned that Johnson had reached an out-of-court settlement with the railway. That settlement, negotiated by Wilson, provides for more than $1 million in staggered payments.
"She's making progress, but she'll never get back to Tech," Johnson said of her daughter.
Johnson didn't want to talk about what happened to Nixon. "My family's just been through too much," she said.
Wilson, Johnson's attorney, says he also got a call from Nixon after she was fired. He says he told her, "I'm just as sorry as I can be." But he credited her with having helped pressure Virginia's legislature to pass a new law letting localities require trains to blow whistles at trestles.
Wilson, a leading advocate of the whistle law, said he told Nixon, "What you've done has saved lives and injuries."
Despite losing her job and the chance to buy a house she was looking at, Nixon says she'd do it again. "I know I was right. . . . I didn't do it for publicity's sake. I only did it trying to help" Johnson.
After the railway fired her, she says, some of her office mates called and said, " `Oh, you're a fool. You lost your job. . . . What have you gained?' "
But the hardest criticism came from her son.
"I'm always telling him, `You gotta help someone.' So after this happened what was the first thing he said? `See Mom! See! See why I don't help nobody. You try to help somebody, see what happens to you.' "