MOBILE, Ala. — A Federal Railroad Administration inspector told a Mobile County jury this week that the engineer at the controls of a freight train that killed a track worker in Prichard nearly six years ago had broken two separate safety rules in the moments before the collision.
The testimony came on the opening day of evidence in the reckless manslaughter trial of James Jeffery “Jamie” Elder, 53, of Spanish Fort. Elder was operating a freight train for the Alabama Export Railroad on the morning of Nov. 17, 2020, pulling cars owned by the Canadian National Railway, when the train struck a maintenance crew working on a stretch of track known as Blount Curve.
The collision dragged Dexter Scott beneath the train and killed him. Scott was working for Continental Rails, a contractor that was replacing railroad ties and performing other preventative maintenance on the line that day.
What the Federal Inspector Told Jurors
Byrl McCoy, an operating practices safety inspector with the Federal Railroad Administration who conducted the agency’s investigation of the crash, walked jurors through the rules that govern what an engineer may and may not do in the cab of a moving locomotive.
The first rule concerns cell phones. McCoy testified that federal regulations require engineers to stow personal electronic devices out of sight while operating a train. The restriction is not a matter of company preference. It is a federal requirement, and it exists for a reason specific to the job: a locomotive engineer’s most important safety input is what he can see out the windshield, and a phone competes directly for that attention.
The second rule concerns speed, and it is the one most likely to shape how jurors understand what happened at Blount Curve. McCoy testified that regulations require engineers to travel no faster than a speed that would allow them to stop within half the distance to the farthest point they can see.
That standard is worth unpacking, because it is not the same as a posted speed limit. A posted limit is a fixed number that applies regardless of conditions. The half-the-distance standard is a variable one. It changes with weather, with darkness, with terrain — and, critically, with the geometry of the track itself. On a straight stretch of open track, an engineer may be able to see a mile ahead, and the rule permits a correspondingly higher speed. On a sharp curve, where a wall of trees or a cut in the earth blocks the view of what lies around the bend, the distance an engineer can see collapses, and the rule requires speed to collapse with it.
Blount Curve, according to testimony, bends at nearly 90 degrees.
The Prosecution’s Theory
Mobile County Assistant District Attorney Jessica Catlin told jurors the evidence shows Elder violated both regulations at once.
“The defendant was speeding when he hit that blind curve, which was almost 90 degrees, and was on his phone,” she said.
Catlin added a third alleged failure to the list. She said Elder did not call dispatch to find out whether a work crew would be on the tracks — a check that, in the state’s telling, would have told him what was waiting around the bend.
“He made a choice to ignore safety protocols that were in place, and now a man is dead,” Catlin said.
The framing of that sentence is deliberate, and it points at the legal question the jury will ultimately have to answer. The state is not arguing that Elder wanted anyone hurt. It is arguing that he chose to set aside rules he knew existed, and that the death followed from that choice.
The Defense Concedes Mistakes but Contests the Legal Standard
Defense attorney John Beck did something in his opening statement that defense lawyers do not often do: he conceded, up front, that his client made mistakes.
“My client had his phone out,” Beck said. “That’s true. … That’s not the issue before you.”
He added: “I’m not sure it would have made a difference.”
Beck’s argument is that Elder may have been careless, and may have been negligent, but that carelessness and negligence are not what the charge requires. For a reckless manslaughter conviction, he told jurors, prosecutors must prove that Elder was actually aware of the risk to the work crew and disregarded it. It is not enough, he said, to allege that the engineer should have been aware of the risk.
That distinction is the central legal fault line of the trial. Under Alabama law, a person acts recklessly when he is aware of and consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk. A person acts with criminal negligence when he fails to perceive such a risk in the first place. Alabama treats those as two different offenses carrying very different consequences: manslaughter is a Class B felony, while criminally negligent homicide is a lesser charge. The gap between “he knew and did it anyway” and “he should have known” is the gap the jury will be asked to measure.
What the Defense Says Elder Did Not Know
Beck pushed back hard on two of the state’s other allegations.
First, he said Elder had no way of knowing a work crew was on the tracks that morning, because the crew’s presence was not posted in the daily operating bulletin that engineers receive before a run. Operating bulletins are the standard mechanism by which railroads tell crews about temporary conditions on a route — slow orders, track closures, maintenance work, equipment out of service. If a hazard is not in the bulletin, an engineer heading out for the day has no routine way to learn about it.
“There were a lot of things that went wrong that morning than just Jamie,” Beck said.
Second, and more strikingly, Beck told jurors that neither Elder nor anyone else at the company he worked for was aware of the line-of-sight speed regulation at all. That claim, if the jury credits it, cuts directly at the recklessness element: a rule a person does not know exists is difficult to consciously disregard.
“This caricature of Jamie acting like some maniac speeding around this curve is not going to be supported by the facts,” Beck said.
A Civil Case That Ended Without a Verdict
The 2020 collision generated litigation as well as criminal charges. Continental Rails, the maintenance contractor whose crew was struck, filed a lawsuit alleging that negligence by Elder, his employer and other defendants caused roughly $500,000 in damage.
That case did not go to a jury. The parties later agreed it should be dismissed. Civil suits between companies resolve that way routinely, and a dismissal by agreement does not establish who was at fault; it establishes that the parties decided not to keep litigating the question in court.
Why a Criminal Charge Against an Engineer Is Unusual
Workplace deaths on railroads are typically handled through federal safety investigation and civil liability rather than felony prosecution of the individual operator. The Federal Railroad Administration investigates, penalties may be assessed against the railroad, and families pursue damages in civil court. A state prosecutor charging the engineer personally with manslaughter puts the individual’s state of mind — not the railroad’s safety culture, not the contractor’s coordination, not the bulletin system — at the center of the proceeding.
That is part of what makes the defense’s framing notable. Beck is not arguing that nothing went wrong on Blount Curve that morning. He is arguing that several things went wrong, involving several parties, and that the criminal law asks a narrower question than the one the facts invite.
What Happens Next
The trial is being heard in Mobile County Circuit Court. The state will continue presenting its case before the defense puts on evidence, and jurors will ultimately be instructed on the legal definitions of recklessness and criminal negligence before they begin deliberating.
Elder is presumed innocent unless and until a jury finds otherwise.
South Alabama News will update this story as the trial proceeds.