“Lift your hands up. Turn around. Turn around,” an officer commanded. “Put your hands up higher. I want you to set your phone down.”

“What’s going on?” the woman asked, voice tight, confused. “Why am I being—”

“We’ll explain everything in a second,” Steinke said, cutting it off like a promise she believed she could keep.

The woman—later identified as 20-year-old Yareni Rios Gonzalez—did as she was told, walking backward toward the sound of commands, hands high, trying to keep her balance on gravel.

“Keep coming back. Keep coming back,” Steinke repeated, her tone steady but intense. “Stop right there. Get down on one knee and then the other.”

Yareni’s breath hitched. “Why are you taking—”

“We’re taking you to the car,” Steinke said.

“Why?”

“Do you have anything on you that’s going to poke me, stick me, hurt me?”

“No, ma’am,” Yareni said, then added quickly, “but can I please get my cell phone?”

“We’ll get your cell phone in a second.”

“Is there any weapons in the car?”

“No, ma’am. There’s nothing—there’s no weapons in the car.”

“Anybody else in the car?” an officer barked, scanning the interior. “Come on out. Do it now.”

“What’s going on?” Yareni asked again, voice rising. “I’m so confused. Can I get—could you please bring my cell phone?”

“Nope,” Steinke said, and the word landed flat.

She guided Yareni into the back seat of Vasquez’s patrol car and shut the door. The lock clicked. The woman’s hands were behind her back. The steel line of the tracks sat just beyond the tires, silent, patient.

Hinged sentence: The moment a door closes, you’re no longer controlling a person—you’re responsible for a life you can’t see.

While Yareni sat restrained, the officers turned toward the pickup and began talking through the stop like it was still the main event.

“Took her a long time to pull over,” someone said.

“I got a holster right here in the passenger seat,” Vasquez noted, as if discovering it justified the tension they’d brought with them.

Steinke and Vasquez continued the search, voices calm enough to suggest the danger was now contained. Their body language said: we’ve got this.

Then a new sound entered the scene—low at first, more vibration than noise. A distant rhythm that didn’t belong to wind or traffic.

One of the officers’ thoughts, later captured by body cam audio, formed as a half-question: toss it out the window… she could have…

The rhythm grew. Steel on steel. A far-off horn, not urgent yet, but unmistakable once your brain labels it.

And still, the patrol car sat where it sat.

Then the horn became a warning instead of a background detail. A bright, violent note cutting through the night.

“Who is that—” someone began, then stopped, like his brain refused to finish the sentence.

“Oh no… that’s—uh oh.”

And then it happened so fast the mind couldn’t keep up.

“Oh my God. Oh my God.”

Metal slammed. The world shook. The patrol car—Vasquez’s car—was struck and shoved like it weighed nothing compared to what was coming through. A train moving around 50 miles an hour, carrying roughly 11,000 tons, didn’t negotiate with mistakes. It simply turned them into consequences.

“346—patrol car just hit by a train,” a voice blurted into the radio, stunned, disbelieving. “Negative… I think we’re all okay.”

There was a pause—just long enough for the brain to replay what the eyes saw.

Then a new realization surfaced, raw and panicked.

“Was she in there?” someone shouted, voice cracking. “Was she in there?”

“Oh my God—yes.”

The back seat. The locked door. The handcuffs. The woman they’d placed inside.

The officers started running down the tracks, boots slipping on gravel, flashlights bouncing wildly.

“Ma’am! Can you hear me?” one yelled as he ran.

In his mind, the question wasn’t just about sound. It was about time. About whether time would forgive them.

Hinged sentence: You can’t undo a decision at the speed you made it.

The smashed patrol car sat mangled near the crossing, twisted in a way that made it hard to believe anyone could survive inside it. Yet a voice over the radio forced reality into the open.

“Female is semi-conscious and moaning,” an officer reported, breathless. “Bleeding serious—yes, very serious.”

“She conscious?” dispatch asked.

“Not fully,” came the strained reply. “She’s conscious and breathing… she can’t talk.”

Officers tugged at doors that wouldn’t open, tried handles that didn’t move, peered through broken angles of metal and glass. The steel wasn’t just damaged; it was rearranged. Even experienced EMTs arriving on scene couldn’t get immediate access.

“We need tools,” someone called out.

A medic leaned in, assessing through a narrow gap. “She’s conscious and breathing,” he said, then seconds later, voice changing, “She just went unconscious.”

“Hello?” an officer pleaded, the word sounding too human to be command. “We got help here.”

In the middle of it, Steinke—who’d been focused minutes earlier on controlling hands and phones—stood blinking like her mind was trying to wake up from a nightmare it didn’t deserve to be real.

“We’re okay,” someone told her quickly, trying to anchor her. “Are you okay?”

“I’m—” Steinke said, then swallowed. “Oh my God.”

A fellow officer stepped in close, voice low, almost protective. “Hey. I love you, and I care about you. Sit in my patrol car. I’ll get you cared for.”

Steinke’s eyes darted to the wreck, then away. “Is he going to take my gun?” she asked suddenly, like her brain had grabbed the first “normal” worry it could find.

“No,” the other officer said, startled by the question. “Why would they—You didn’t shoot anybody, did you?”

Steinke shook her head, too fast. “No.”

“What was the call?” he asked, trying to bring her back to sequence.

“Road rage,” she said, but it sounded like a word from another life.

Nearby, a Platteville officer approached the train conductor, who stood with his own shock written across his face.

“Are you the conductor?” the officer asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” the conductor said, exhaling hard. “You surprised, huh? Even responding to this, I’m a little shaken up. We seen the lights when they were coming up. We thought they were on the road… until we turned the corner and then our lights hit—hit the cars. We put it in emergency, but… we’re going 50 miles an hour with 11,000 tons.”

He said it like an apology, like physics needed to explain itself.

“It was just an empty vehicle we had, right?” the officer said, almost pleading for the answer to be yes.

A pause.

“I think… the suspect lady… she was in the back,” the officer admitted. “I think she’s okay.”

Nobody believed that sentence when they looked at the wreck.

Hinged sentence: The most terrifying part of a preventable disaster is hearing yourself try to minimize it.

Firefighters arrived with heavy tools. Metal screamed as they pried, cut, and pulled. When Yareni was finally removed, she was alive—but her condition made it obvious the night had changed her body and her future in ways nobody could shrug off. The officers, standing in the wet darkness, had a brief, ugly gap where they realized something else.

They didn’t even know who she was.

“No idea who she is,” someone admitted, voice thin.

“Okay,” another responded, trying to sound professional through shaking breath. “Let’s get you back with the woman.”

When they went through her belongings, the identification surfaced like a punchline nobody wanted. A credential. A name.

“That’s her,” an officer said. “TSA… Federal Emergency Response.”

Yareni Rios Gonzalez. Wife. Mother. Transportation Security Administration employee.

The irony felt cruel: a woman whose job centered on safety and secure procedures had been placed, handcuffed, into a situation where basic scene safety was missed.

Amid the chaos, the firearm was located—found where officers had suspected it might be. But the priority had shifted so violently it almost didn’t matter in that moment.

“There’s your gun,” someone said, and it sounded hollow.

The conversations on scene drifted strangely, as if the human brain, overwhelmed, tried to protect itself with small talk and dark humor.

“We want to start off the newscast with some breaking news,” someone muttered, forcing a laugh that didn’t fit. “Hit by a train… man.”

Another voice, quieter: “I feel really bad.”

They told themselves she’d be okay because she’d been awake, because she’d moaned, because she’d survived the immediate impact. They didn’t yet have language for what “survival” can cost.

Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents arrived to handle the crash inquiry and stared at the wreckage with the kind of silence that isn’t judgment so much as disbelief.

“Can you imagine sitting in that car,” one agent said softly, “hands behind your back… and seeing a train coming?”

No one answered, because the answer was in the twisted metal.

Two investigations now sat side by side. One into the alleged road rage incident. One into the train crash itself. The agents talked it through like people trying to separate tangled wires.

“I want to interview her as a victim of this part,” an agent said, meaning the crash.

“And you’re going to be interviewing her as a suspect on the other part,” another replied.

“We may want to do that separately.”

“She might not remember anything,” someone added.

“She very well may not,” came the response. “And it may be something where she starts remembering later.”

The next day, police went to the hospital to speak with Yareni. They were met with a quiet refusal.

“She was awake and alert earlier,” a nurse told them, “and declined talking to anybody.”

“Can I hear that from her?” an officer asked, voice strained, like he needed to know for his own peace. “I kind of need to know… personally for her.”

But soon after, her attorney made it clear: she would not be speaking to law enforcement about the incident. Her legal team would later argue the man who called 911 had been brake-checking her and that she’d been afraid for her life during the road encounter—details that complicated the original reason for the stop, but didn’t change the catastrophic fact of where the patrol car had been placed.

Hinged sentence: The call that starts an incident can be disputed; the impact that ends it cannot.

In the days that followed, the most damning witness wasn’t a person. It was a camera.

Footage from Officer Steinke’s dash cam captured the collision from a fixed, indifferent angle. No emotions. No excuses. Just the scene as it was: patrol cars, tracks, the sudden arrival of something unstoppable. The body cam audio added frantic human texture—someone yelling to move cars, someone realizing too late where the prisoner actually was.

One officer later described it with the kind of regret that sounds like it lives in the chest permanently. “I was behind her car,” he said. “Mine’s that Explorer. I thought the person in custody was in hers. Then I saw the train, and I started to make a step because I saw the custody was not in hers… tried to get her out… knew I didn’t have time… yelled for you guys to stay back… and that was it.”

That was it. A sentence people say when there’s nothing left to do but watch.

In July 2023, Officer Jordan Steinke was found guilty of reckless endangerment and third-degree assault charges. She was sentenced to 30 months of probation and 100 hours of community service. Sergeant Pablo Vasquez pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment and received one year of unsupervised probation. Both were fired from their departments. Those are the clean legal lines, the kind that fit neatly into court records.

The human costs did not fit neatly anywhere.

CBI later classified Yareni as having suffered serious bodily injury. Her attorney would say she lost teeth, suffered a broken arm, multiple broken ribs, and a traumatic brain injury. Her mother started a GoFundMe to help with expenses. Even if the physical injuries eventually stabilized, the emotional and psychological impact—the helplessness of being restrained in the back seat while danger approached—was its own kind of aftermath.

And then came the number that turned the story into a warning label for every training academy and city council meeting that followed.

On June 4, 2024, Yareni Rios Gonzalez won an $8.5 million settlement from the cities of Fort Lupton and Platteville—roughly a year and a half after the crash.

$8.5 million couldn’t buy back the moment the door clicked shut. It couldn’t rewind the horn. It couldn’t erase the steel line of the tracks that had been there the entire time, waiting to be noticed.

But it did something else: it forced the mistake to become permanent in the public record.

Long after the broken patrol car was hauled away, long after the news cycle moved on, the tracks stayed where they always were—silent, ordinary, and unforgiving. That’s what made this so haunting. Nothing about the crossing was new. Nothing about the danger was hidden. The disaster didn’t come from a freak event. It came from a routine that slipped, just once, into the wrong place.

The officers would replay it in their minds in ways no footage could fully capture. The stop. The commands. The moment they thought the risk was controlled. The way nobody said, out loud, “We’re on the tracks.” The way the scene felt safe until it wasn’t. The way panic changes a person’s voice into something barely recognizable.

And for Yareni, the memory—whether fragmented or sharp—would have to live beside the knowledge that she’d been restrained and unable to protect herself, trapped in a vehicle that became a target of circumstance and error.

The night began with a 911 call about road rage and a claim of a gun. It ended with a realization that sounded like a prayer and a scream at the same time.

“Was she in there?”

“Yes.”

Hinged sentence: The worst mistakes aren’t the ones made with bad intentions—they’re the ones made casually, because they feel normal right up until they don’t.