Jamie Kemsey's voice resonates beneath the clatter of a Mission District coffeehouse. Pausing to stare at his fingers shredding the plastic seal of his Odwalla, he says, "It's really hard for me to be rational about this."
There has been little rationality in Kemsey's life since the last day of August. That morning his wife, Nina, left their 17th Street apartment and headed for her job at a downtown ad agency were she worked as an account coordinator.
"I knew her routine," Kemsey says. "She'd look for a J Church at 16th. If there wasn't one, she'd head up to the underground station at Market."
Just before 8:30 a.m., as she was crossing Church Street at Market, Nina Kemsey was struck by a J Church train traveling southbound through the labyrinthine intersection of Church, Market, and 14th streets. Witnesses say she had the green light, and that the Muni train had failed to sound its horn and appeared to brake only at the last second.
In the vernacular of such tragedies, Nina sustained massive head injuries. A day-and-a-half later, just after midnight on Sept. 2, she was pronounced brain dead at S.F. General Hospital.
"You can't imagine what that was like," says the short-haired Kemsey, a 31-year-old animal-rights activist and free-lance music critic who looks more like a skate punk than a widower. "I was going to spend the rest of my life with Nina. My soul's been ripped out."
Last week salt was heaped on Kemsey's wound when Muni cleared the driver who killed his wife. A three-person accident review board found that Frank Lipkins, a veteran with over 20 years behind the wheel, hadn't run the red light at Church and Market as some witnesses contend. Police and Muni investigators laid the blame for the accident at Nina's feet, saying she had refused to yield to a vehicle lawfully in the intersection.
"They let him off," Kemsey says, his voice stumbling beneath the weight of his words. "Not even a slap on the wrist." And the exoneration of the driver is only the latest U-turn in a serpentine series of events that began the day Nina was hit.
Lipkins, who held Nina's hand until the paramedics arrived, at first maintained that she had been crossing against the light, an assertion that Muni promulgated as fact.
Jamie Kemsey knew this wasn't true.
"You wouldn't believe it," he says, "but Nina was the last person in the universe who refused to cross a street if the light was red. It was a thing with her. She'd grab ahold of me, physically stop me from crossing if the light wasn't green."
Based on eyewitness accounts (and at 8:30 in the morning at Church and Market, there was no shortage of eyewitnesses), the initial police report, filed by the first officers on the scene, concluded that the train had entered the intersection on either a yellow or a red light and failed to yield to a pedestrian lawfully in the crosswalk. Muni backed away from the claim that Kemsey was crossing against the light (although as late as last Thursday, a Muni spokesperson mistakenly told me she had been crossing on a red) and Lipkins was charged by Muni with having an avoidable accident and suspended from driving duties pending the outcome of a full investigation. The District Attorney's Office also considered filing manslaughter charges against Lipkins based upon the conclusions of the investigating officers.
Jamie Kemsey got word of the driver's suspension on Sept. 21, what would have been Nina's 34th birthday.
"It sounds to me that [Muni] is starting to admit there was a mistake," he told a Chronicle reporter at the time. "My life has been taken away because of a driver who wasn't paying attention."
While the inquiry by police and Muni investigators plodded on through September, Kemsey retained a lawyer and filed a wrongful death claim based upon the findings of the police report. The city has six months to respond; if they do nothing, Kemsey plans to take them to court.
"I'm not thinking about money," he says of the claim. "I just want to get to the bottom of this."
Then in early October Kemsey learned of a collision reconstruction the police had conducted. Prepared by Inspector Michael Mahoney, a police officer recognized by the court as an expert in such matters, the accident re-enactment was the first indication Kemsey and his lawyer had that the driver wouldn't be disciplined.
Mahoney's report meticulously reconstructs the scene of the accident on paper, taking into consideration such abstract variables as the theoretical walking speed of an adult female and the drag factor of a light rail vehicle's emergency braking system. Mahoney measured the treacherous intersection and calculated the time needed for a Muni train to cross the 206 feet from the north side of Market to the spot where the train struck Kemsey just beyond the crosswalk on the south side of the intersection. Against this, he factored the estimated time it took Nina Kemsey to walk from where she stood on the passenger island to the "point of impact" some 22 feet, 5 inches away.
