The five men rode up front, whether out of preference or habit or for no good reason. They were going home from a day’s work. Finance work. Art work. Things like that.
The commonness of their commute became nightmarish when the Metro-North Railroad train carrying them plowed into a sport-utility vehicle stuck on the tracks at a Westchester County crossing during the frigid Tuesday evening rush. The five men died, as did the woman driving the crumpled car. She, too, had finished a day’s work.
The medical examiner was still in the process of definitively confirming the identities of the victims, so badly were the bodies burned. The driver, however, was identified by officials as Ellen Brody, a jewelry store worker, and one of the commuters was confirmed by friends as Eric M. Vandercar, a financial executive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art said it believed that Walter Liedtke, a curator of European paintings, was another victim.
Ms. Brody, 49, a married mother of three, worked at ICD Contemporary Jewelry, a shop in Chappaqua. She had been with the store for more than a decade, and was a bookkeeper and sales associate.
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“He was an intellectual,” Ms. LaMott’s husband, Tom LaMott, said. “He never mentioned retirement. He loved what he was doing.”
Worldly as he was, he was always hungry to learn new things. He spent his time on the train reading. And so he had a firm preference.
“He liked riding in the front of the train,” Ms. LaMott said. “It’s the quiet car.”
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the New York community where Eric M. Vandercar’s family lives. It is Bedford Hills, not Bedford Falls.
