‘This is some James Bond s***!’: Boy Scout finds courage during Amtrak train crash

Tired from lack of sleep, Isaac Berken, 15, was reclining with his cell phone earbuds in, watching the post-apocalyptic train movie “Snowpiercer” as the actual train he was on sped toward the Mendon, Missouri, crossing.

Then he felt the train stutter.

“There were murmurs around, like, ‘Oh, we hit a deer,’” Berken recalled. He saw white smoke out the window and, for some reason he can’t explain, decided to stabilize himself and grab the seat in front of him.

Then he felt the Southwest Chief topple, running at near 89 miles per hour, crashing its right side, plowing up dirt and rock as it skidded to a grinding halt.

Berken is a Boy Scout and high school sophomore who, with 14 fellow scouts and seven leaders, was returning home to Appleton, Wisconsin, from New Mexico’s Philmont scout ranch. Over the next hour, he would find himself dealing with death and injury in a manner he never conjured:

Calling for his fellow scouts to place a blanket over a dead woman, her body mangled in dirt heaped inside a train car.

Comforting and holding the shaken.

Striding across the top of the two-engine train, its eight cars stretched out on their sides at the edge of a cornfield.

“Right then,” Berken said, “I didn’t think it was weird. I was just so caught up in the moment. But later on I was like, ‘Holy crap, this is some James Bond shit.’”

Berken, even months later, would insist that he was not fundamentally changed by the events of June 27, when, at 12:42 p.m., the Amtrak Southwest Chief, headed from Los Angeles to Chicago, collided with the side of a dump truck at a rural Missouri crossing. The impact killed the truck driver, three passengers and injured some 150 others.

But one part of him is different, Berken said: Trained in first aid and taught, as the Scout motto says, to “be prepared,” he sometimes wondered how he might fare in a real emergency.

At 6-foot-3, Berken is big for a sophomore, with a resonant baritone voice. He plays basketball and volleyball and has played snare and bass drum in the band at Appleton North High School. But he’s also suffered anxiety in recent years.

But now he knows.

“Gave me a lot of confidence,” he said. “Just to know that I could do something like this and not freeze up.”

Indeed, just the opposite. As the train spilled over, “Snowpiercer” was still playing in his ear buds. “Bodies are popping out of their seats,” Berken said.

His phone fell away, so did he, seated next to a right hand window near the back end of the last car on the train. “It was like diving, out of control,” he said.

For some, the derailment seemed to unfurl in slow motion. Berken sensed it occurred in a flash. He tumbled into the luggage rack.

“Then, boom, I’m wedged in,” he recalled.

A few people screamed and cried, he recalled, but most of his fellow Scouts, like his best friend, Owen Tierney, seated next to him, were mostly calm, showing more shock or disbelief than fear.

“Like everyone was contemplating the fact that, ‘Oh, my god, we just tipped over,’” he said.

Wearing shorts, a shirt and socks — his new pair of blue Crocs nowhere near — Berken checked himself for injuries. None. Scouts began ushering passengers out the car’s rear door. Others popped open the windows above.

One scout, Elijah Skrypczak, made his way outside and, according to media reports, was at the side of the dump truck driver, 54-year-old Billy Barton II, when he died.

Berken saw no blood. But one woman remained wedged in the luggage rack. “Clearly in pain,” he said. A couple of adult troop leaders were hurt.

“There were three or four spinal injuries,” he said. He knew they’d have to wait on medics and backboards.

He made a sling for one woman, comforted, provided calm, for others. Then he organized.

“I asked everyone who was able to get water,” Berken said. “People who are injured and dehydrated need water ASAP. …

“There was one lady, especially. Eventually we had to force it down her throat because she looked like she was going to pass out. I had her family members do that for her.”

Paramedics arrived. Berken, in his socks, took to the top of the train to check other cars. Paramedics, by that time, were on the scene. One, he said, called out to him:

Hey, buddy, you need to put some shoes on.

“So I walked down. There was this kid, about my age, just kind of sitting there and not doing anything. I was like, ‘Hey, can I have your shoes?’ He was, like, ‘Sure. OK.’”

Berken slipped on the kid’s Air Jordans and went from car to car along the top of the train, like a James Bond movie, he thought later.

Then, down below, between train cars, he saw a woman’s body. He called out to his friends to get a blanket. The Scout Law: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful. . . reverent.”

“Looking back, like, that was the first time I’ve seen a deceased person not in a coffin,” Berken said. “I’m kind of surprised how hard, like, it didn’t hit me, because I was so caught up in the moment. Like something that’s as powerful as that is going to hit everyone differently.”

Later, he would say, “It’s the one image that keeps flashing back in my mind, but there’s no real emotion with it.”

His emotions would seep out later. First he would hand out more water, give back the Air Jordans to the boy who loaned them, find his blue Crocs, then lose one in the mud, walking to comfort another passenger.

A bus took Berken, other scouts, passengers and crew to a local high school, set up as a central hub. A police officer there was asking passengers how they were doing.

“I was like, ‘I’m OK,’” he said he told her. But the officer persisted.

“‘Look me in the eye,’” he recalled her saying, “‘and tell me you’re OK.’”

“I couldn’t do that,” Berken said. He said he couldn’t force out the words.

“I didn’t cry, but tears started streaming down my face.

“I had a little moment then,” he continued. “But it was smooth sailing from there.”

Hours after the accident, the scouts were transported to Boone Hospital to be checked out, and then were taken to a hotel. In the morning, they were flown by charter flight to Green Bay, Wisconsin. Back in Appleton, they were greeted with relief by their families.

Others called them heroic.

“I’ve just become so confident that even when you’re pushed to your limits, you can go further,” Berken said. “A lot of people have told me, ‘Oh, I would have been terrible. I would have left in that situation.’ Well, I would have thought that, too. You don’t know how well you would perform in a situation like that until you’ve done it.

“Some of my friends are like, ‘Isaac, I would have cried. I would have broken down.’

“Well, maybe you won’t.”