Father, daughter killed in crash at rail crossing

Jan. 24--A man drove through a railroad crossing gate and was hit by a Metra train in Round Lake Park, killing him and his 7-year-old daughter Wednesday, officials said.

The gate had been fixed just hours earlier, but there was no indication the gate was malfunctioning at the time of the crash, officials said.

Alyssa Carranza died of a broken neck when she was thrown from the car and hit a post, the Lake County coroner's office concluded. Her body was not discovered immediately, but was found within an hour by crash investigators in the snow in a nearby ditch, authorities said. Coroner Thomas Rudd said he believed the girl died from the accident, not the cold.

The driver, Francisco Carranza, 36, of Round Lake Beach, died of multiple head trauma.

Carranza was driving a 2006 Range Rover on Illinois Highway 134 when the car drove in front of an outbound train at just before 6 p.m. Wednesday</chron>, Round Lake Park police Chief George Filenko said. The train was traveling at about 60 mph, and the engineer had no chance to stop in time, Metra spokeswoman Meg Reile said.

The train knocked the Range Rover into another SUV carrying a mother with several children, including an infant, and causing minor damage but no injuries, the chief said.

Witnesses and security video from a nearby trailer park confirmed that the car drove through the gate, Filenko said.

The train had an estimated $200,000 in damage, and was stuck at the site for nearly three hours while police investigated, officials said. Passengers were transferred to a bus for the remaining stops.

Officials said Thursday that Carranza had alcohol in his system.

The Lake County Major Crash Assistance Team was investigating the crash, interviewing train personnel and other witnesses and getting data from the train's "black box" data recorder, Filenko said.

At 2:43 p.m. that day, Metra police had been at the crossing while workers repaired a previously broken gate there, Reile said. Workers finished the repairs and left the scene before the accident occurred, she said. The repairs were to the wooden part of the gate only, and there was no indication the mechanism was malfunctioning, she said.

Illinois secretary of state records indicated Carranza had a clean driving record, officials said.

Despite police officers' reputation for being tough-skinned, Filenko said, it's particularly difficult for them working on cases like this in which a child dies. "These cases really hurt us," he said.

A friend, Frumencio Acevedo, said Carranza grew up in Palatine and owned Carranza Insurance Agency in Mundelein and Round Lake. He and was well-known for translating to help people get auto insurance and navigate driver's license facilities, Acevedo said.

"He was a big help for the Hispanic community," he said. "Everybody looked up to him. He was an honest person."

He was "very family-oriented," Acevedo said, often doing things with his two daughters and a son.

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