Peter Wade
Back on July 7th, 1982, fifteen-year-old Peter Wade and four of his friends were doing what teenage boys do best: looking for trouble. They often liked to hang around railway tracks in their hometown of Fairlawn, New Jersey. On that night they were out drinking beers and messing about. Suddenly someone said that it would be a good idea to mess with the railway switch when they spotted an oncoming train in the distance. They group obliged, and flipped the switch exactly when the train was passing. This caused the five car train traveling at 60mph to derail and crash directly into the walls of a nearby factory. On board there were seven passengers and two crew members who sustained injuries. However it was the train engineer at the front, Jack Duffy, who tragically died when protecting a small boy who wanted to see the front of the train. Wade and his friends actions caused irritable harm and damage that took the life of an innocent man.
Wade and his friends immediately fled the scene, and then learned that their actions caused a man to die the next day when they watched the news. Wade recalls that it was “one of the sickest moments of my life, I wanted to throw up immediately at realizing what I had done”. The Police took Wade and his four friends into custody, and subsequently charged Wade and two others as the ones responsible for the crimes. Wade plead guilty to his crimes and was incarcerated for manslaughter. He would spend 22 months in prison, a fraction of his total five year sentence, before being released at the age of 20.
