BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Homeowners are pushing back on a plea by parents and students to close a railroad crossing by Palo Alto High School as a way to prevent more suicides.
Homeowners are worried about ambulances taking longer to get to Stanford Hospital and thousands more cars stuck on Embarcadero Road.
“Supposedly solving a perceived problem on Churchill by transferring it to surrounding neighborhoods is not a solution. It is a redistribution resulting in real harm,” Professorville resident Barbara Hazlett told Palo Alto City Council on March 2.
Resident Alexis Hamilton, who used the Churchill Avenue crossing to get to her radiation treatments for cancer, said Embarcadero Road is already “a nightmare” and will only get worse when the Town and Country Shopping Center adds housing.
“While my heart is heavy at the loss of another Palo Alto student to suicide, closing the Churchill rail crossing to traffic is a terrible, and probably ineffective, solution to the real problem of teen despair,” Hamilton said in an email to council on Feb. 15.
Convenience
On the other side are parents like Mare Lucas, who lost her son Zane, a wrestler at Gunn High School, to suicide nine years ago.
“To all the people in our community who worry about the inconvenience: I honestly don’t know what to say,” Lucas told the school board on Feb. 10.
Lucas said she spent six hours at the Churchill crossing on Feb. 3 after Summer Devi Mehta, 17, committed suicide there.
“Every time the train went by — the deafening sound and the fast speed — a little more of my heart died,” Lucas said.
Parent Linda Henigan read a letter from Mehta’s father, who said the crossing allowed Mehta to act impulsively at a low moment.
“It’s too late for my daughter, but not too late for others,” Mehta’s father said in his letter.
Mehta was the third Palo Alto student to die by suicide in the last year. Ash He, 15, died on March 4, 2025, and Emily Fiedel, 17, on Aug. 9.
Student hears the train
Student Ann Nguyen said she hears the train almost constantly — in class, on her short walk to school and while lying in bed trying to sleep.
“Make our crossings safer. We cannot keep losing our friends,” Nguyen told the school board.
Mayor Vicki Veenker said the city is looking at a temporary closure with Caltrain and the California Public Utilities Commission.
The commission would review the city’s plan for rerouting pedestrians and bicyclists, traffic circulation and signs, signal changes and fencing.
“A closure is complex and would need to address many issues, such as emergency response,” Veenker said in a Feb. 6 statement.
The city will have a meeting to get feedback on the closure at the school district office on Thursday. Council will consider next steps in mid-April.
In the meantime, council on Feb. 23 hired security guards to watch all four crossings in Palo Alto 24/7.
The city will also have workshops at the Mitchell Park Community Center on March 18 and 19 to teach residents how to recognize signs that someone may be in distress.
It’s lunacy to think that closing a crossing will suddenly convince a suicidal individual to not take their life. They’ll just jump a fence or walk to another crossing. This is the ultimate do something that has no impact to feel good. Meanwhile, you just aggravate tens of thousands of people just trying to get through their day.
If Churchill was closed, why wouldn’t students just go a mile down Alma to the old Palo Alto/MP rail crossing? It will still be open.
Writing a two page suicide note and posting it publicly shows advance planning rather than an impulsive act.
It’s a tragedy whenever someone of any age commit suicide but I wonder why those urging Churchill’s closure cite “the deafening” and “constant” train noise as justification.
Closing Churchill won’t stop the train noise.
Will logic matter to our City Council reps?
Probably not since they seem to prefer virtue-signaling and fine-tuning PA’s “new and improved” values statement to addressing problems known for years.
To cite just one example: They’ve 2 years of pleas for action supported by photo evidence to remove the RVS parked in the bike lanes near 2 schools on Fabian.
Either they care about their “priorities” of child safety and biking or they don’t.
Here’s parallel, better suggestion to reducing deaths than closing The Churchill crossing.
Estimates are there have been 3 Palo Alto/Gunn train track suicides in the past 5 years.
Meanwhile, there have been 2 high-speed deaths yearly on 101 in Palo Alto.
So 10 vs. 3 during the same period.
So if we are concerned about reducing the largest number of potentially preventable deaths, why don’t we reduce the PA 101 speed limit to 55, and leave Churchill open?
Can we instead make a law that parents have to drive their kids to school
Or, we can just close the trains, right?
I’m all for putting in some AI and magic gates, but closing a road/hurting fire and police department access. Maybe students should take courses in cognitive therapy and Stoicism. Those work.
What are the biggest causes of death of teens, according to the CDC? If you listen to some people in Palo Alto, you’d think the number one cause was teens jumping in front of trains. That’s just hysteria. The leading cause is car accidents, followed closely by other kinds of accidents. Truth is, kids don’t think about suicide unless the adults in their life are relentlessly talking about it. Let’s let kids be kids, and quit all this gloom and doom. Parents, particularly moms, you’re transferring your neuroses to your kids.
With declining enrollment, close Paly and bus the students to Gunn. Paly could then be used for district management buildings and adult education programs .Our community has such a large administration that this extra space would allow for more growth and programming development. Like the recently remodeled middle school pools, not being used by students, we could rent out all the new space to private organizations and businesses. We could charge below market prices and tell taxpayers the move was for the children and community. Who would be against saving lives?