Lisa Fitzgerald doesn’t remember precisely how she slipped under NJ Transit train 6936 as it rolled into Morristown on a drizzly Saturday night last month. But she vividly recalls pulling herself up onto the eastbound platform after losing her left leg.
“There was not a single second in my mind that I thought, ‘I’m going to die here.’ It was just, ‘How do I get out of this, how do I survive this?’” said the 30-year-old financial adviser from Queens. [Fitzgerald is a 2012 graduate of Verona High School.]
Fitzgerald spoke with Morristown Green on Tuesday, exactly one month after the May 4, 2024, incident that changed her life forever.
She sat in a Route 10 motel, her stump swathed in gauze bandages, ahead of a Wednesday consultation with her surgeon, Dr. Michael Resnikoff, at Morristown Medical Center.
Petite and animated, with a radiant smile that she beamed often during an hour-long interview, Fitzgerald acknowledged 24-7 pain, and some grieving.
Mostly, the Totowa native expressed gratitude–for the first responders who saved her, and for online donors who have contributed nearly $120,000 for her rehab. She cited a desire to help other young trauma victims, and to return soon to the dance floor and gym.
Self-pity was not on the agenda.
“You have to keep pushing. You have to keep making progress,” she said.
‘MY WHOLE LEG PRETTY MUCH WAS GONE’
After dinner at the Morris Plains home of her brother, sister-in-law and their baby, Olivia Joy, Fitzgerald was ready to head back to New York on May 4. Her boyfriend, a musician, was performing that night.
Too late for the train in Morris Plains, she got an Uber to the Morristown station. The Morris & Essex Line was pulling in at 7:23 pm. She hurried with the intention of grabbing a front car; the rear cars sometimes are closed at night.
“How exactly it happened is kind of a blur, really,” Fitzgerald said. “I was running to catch the train. It was moving. I was running up the stairs to the platform. I tripped, somebody said… I just slipped, somehow.”
She knows this: “Nobody bumped me. Nobody pushed me.”
When asked if her balance could have been off from, say, a little too much wine at dinner, Fitzgerald chuckled.
“(Baby) formulas were the only bottles we were passing around,” she said.
New Jersey Transit Police only will say that their investigation is ongoing.
Having a train collision victim to interview is rare. “Pedestrian strikes” at the Morristown station, and elsewhere, inevitably end in grisly death, often as suicides.
Morristown’s most recent train fatality was a 33-year-old man, in February. At that point, such deaths across New Jersey already were on pace to surpass last year’s total of 25, according to NJ Transit.
Fitzgerald related the next chilling sequence almost matter-of-factly.
“I fell through the gap. As soon as I fell through the gap, (the wheels) cut off my leg. It spun me around. I landed on my stomach in the opposite direction.
“Then I saw the next set of wheels coming at me. I rolled out of the way, kind of took stock. Saw that my whole leg pretty much was gone. I thought I had broken my (other) foot because I wasn’t able to stand up.
“I got on my knee as high as I could get up, and reached up to the top of the platform and pulled myself over the edge,” Fitzgerald said.
A few people had been waiting for the train, she said. When nobody reacted to her cries for help, “I just went into action mode. It was like, I can’t stay down here. Another train’s coming. No one’s helping me. I have to get out.”
Maybe her training as an EMT — she became a volunteer in 2015 as a biology student at East Carolina University– kicked in. “I’m really good in crisis situations,” she offered.
Growing up with with seven siblings, including three older brothers who wrestled, builds toughness, too, she suggested.
Fitzgerald tried removing her flannel outer shirt to make a tourniquet, but lacked the strength. Squeezing her stump as hard as she could, she screamed some more.
A young conductor from the train responded, Fitzgerald said. She tried to enlist his aid making a tourniquet, but he looked “white as a ghost.”
“The poor kid. I felt so terrible for him. I tried to calm him down,” Fitzgerald said.
‘TOURNIQUET, TOURNIQUET!’
Morristown Police Officer Nico Hollain was backing up Officer Michael Cerick on a motor vehicle stop near the train station when a stunned-looking man approached them.
“I need an EMT,” the man said.
Why? Hollain asked.
“Her leg.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s gone… she got hit by a train.”
Hollain dashed to the platform. Fitzgerald was at the far end, “yelling and screaming a little bit.” Blood was everywhere, he said.
“Shouldn’t I be in shock?” Fitzgerald remembers asking police. The pain “was just excruciating, absolutely excruciating.”
“Honestly, she was pretty much a champ with it,” said Hollain, 28, who managed Crunch Fitness before joining the police two-and-a-half years ago.
Fitzgerald joked about having dropped food on the tracks. In the ambulance, she spoke of half-price pedicures, recollected Morristown Police Officer David Moran.
He had rushed to the scene from North Park Place when he heard “tourniquet, tourniquet!” from Hollain over his police radio.
“Your adrenaline goes from zero to one hundred,” said Moran, 28, who was hired last year. The 38-year-old Cerick, an eight-year police veteran, also arrived swiftly. None of them ever had encountered anything like this.
Their training paid off: About a month earlier, Hollain and fellow officers had attended a refresher course on tourniquets and other emergency procedures at the Morris County Public Safety Training Academy.
Hollain immediately tied off Fitzgerald’s thigh, high and tight, to keep her from bleeding to death.
Fitzgerald’s wisecracks persisted. When police asked her age, she inquired if they had found her driver’s license. They had not.
“Well in that case, I’m 24, about to be 25!” she remembers replying.
Preparing to lift her onto a stretcher, officers asked her weight.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I think I just lost about 15 or 20 pounds.”
Fitzgerald lights up when talking about these cops. “They were awesome,” she said.
Death, she maintains, never was an option. “I was going to survive,” Fitzgerald asserted. “That’s not how I’m going to die.” She expects to go out in a car crash, after sneezing behind the wheel, “when I’m very old.”
The closest she came to passing out in Morristown, she said, was in the ambulance. Paramedics began inserting an intravenous tube. Fitzgerald warned them she’s afraid of needles.
“That one wasn’t a joke. But they thought it was hilarious!”
Fitzgerald squeezed Officer Moran’s hand all the way to the operating room. From injury to emergency surgery was about 15 minutes, she figures.
Although Morristown Firefighter Sean Gaffney recovered Fitzgerald’s severed leg from beneath the train, there was no hope of reattaching it. Doctors thought they might save what remained of her knee, but that was not possible either, Fitzgerald said.
She would celebrate her 30th birthday in Morristown Medical Center. Over her two-week stay, family and friends partied with her again on Mother’s Day, and for her sister’s graduation from law school. Fitzgerald said she was moved to a bigger room because of the crowds.
“The whole time, she kept everyone’s spirits up…I can’t even think about what I’d be like if that happened to me,” said Brian Gormley, a singer-songwriter from Longford, Ireland. He has been dating Fitzgerald since they met two years ago at Scallywags, an Irish pub in Manhattan where he was playing.
Seeing Fitzgerald not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk to recovery, has put things in perspective for him.
“You worry about taxes, or am I going to lose this gig, or whatever, and then she goes through that and is cracking jokes and smiling the next day…it’s just an inspiration and an honor to know her and be part of her life,” Gormley said.
Fitzgerald’s friends keep telling her the same thing: If they had to pick anyone for such an ordeal, it would be her. Because she could handle it.
“I guess, thank you?’” she tells them.
A month after the incident, she is taking things day by day. She “crutches around” her Queens neighborhood despite constant pain— real and imagined. She has phantom sensations of her lost limb.
“I feel like I have my leg still. It does not feel any differently. I can flex my toes, I can bend my knee. You can feel my thigh muscles moving when I’m doing those things in my head.”
A nurse and physical therapist will make house calls until Fitzgerald is ready for outpatient therapy. It will be three to six months until she is healed sufficiently for her first prosthetic leg. Every three years she will need to replace it.
Prosthetic technology has come a long way. Fitzgerald said a mobile app can control a computer in a prosthetic knee, adjusting the user’s gait for walking, hiking, and even, for high heels.
Fitzgerald’s athletic background — softball shortstop, cheerleader, jazz and contemporary dance, gymnastics—gives her confidence. Dance and gymnastics, especially.
“Living life on one leg, I’m like, I can do that, it’s easy. I spent so many years on one leg.”
She is re-examining the balance in her frenetic lifestyle as well.
“This was a big sign telling me I needed to slow down for a little while, maybe stop and think things through…I wasn’t doing it. And now I’m forced to.”
Eventually, she intends to return to work as a financial representative in her family’s business, the Fitzgerald Group of the Northeast Financial Network. She also plans to pursue national certification as an emergency medical technician. And she is eager to resume Pilates and Zumba.
Once she masters her prosthetic leg, she even may join a kick-boxing club.
“Just going to the gym or picking up my niece — I’ll be able to hold her and walk around with her, throw her in the air– those types of things are the things that I’m missing, and that I’m looking forward to.”
Fitzgerald said she wants to provide encouragement to other trauma victims, paying forward an outpouring of support she described as overwhelming and humbling.
A GoFundMe drive has raised nearly $119,000 so far. While fortunate to have good health insurance, Fitzgerald said donations will help buy prosthetic limbs, which cost about $10,000, and retrofit her apartment for a wheelchair.
She has no time for tears. As she pondered her past and future, footstep metaphors kept creeping into the conversation.
“It happened. You can’t change it. The train happened. All we can do is work through it and get past it. Every day is a new opportunity to take a step forward,” Fitzgerald said.
“And every day you spend being upset or being depressed by it, or letting it get to you, is a day you lose a step.”
This story first appeared in Morristown Green, an independent news partner of MyVeronaNJ.com, under the headline “‘I was going to survive’: Woman who lost leg in Morristown train incident looks to future.” It is reprinted here with the permission of Morristown Green.
My Lord I am absolutely blown away by Lisa’s courage. I cried as I read her story but thought, yes it’s sad but yet hopeful that she assumed a survival attitude, saw to her needs and that help was on the way so quickly. I’m a huge admirer Lisa and I can hardly wait to hear more about your recovery. God bless you and keep you strong. 😘