HENDERSON COUNTY, Ky. (WEHT) – Investigators are still trying to put the pieces together to figure out what happened at a Henderson County railroad crossing Tuesday morning that led to the deaths of a father and son from Florida. The Henderson County Sheriff’s Office says Basten Johnson was driving a Mercedes-Benz with his son, Basi Johnson, in the passenger seat. While attempting to cross railroad tracks at Cherry Hill Road and Robards-Busby Station Road, a train struck the vehicle in the driver’s side.
The men were both pronounced dead at the scene. The two were employees for Moss Contracting, the company working on a solar project in the Robards-area. The sheriff’s office says given the time of the morning, plus witnesses who were waiting to cross, driving to their work site, it is likely the Johnson’s were also on their way to work.
Names of father and son killed in Robards train crash released
The sheriff’s office is working with CSX to continue the investigation, but Sheriff Chip Stauffer says new information related to a cause is not likely. “It’s an unfortunate tragedy that we’ll never know,” says Sheriff Stauffer. “Those are the questions that people have and there’s no way to find those answers, you know? We don’t know, as simple as something dropped or a phone rang or something, it distracted them just enough to, ‘Oh, oh gosh, what do we do now?’, and at that point there was nothing they could do.”
Sheriff Stauffer says incidents like this are rare, and he says changes at the railroad crossing are not likely…