Green Bay Reporter

A team of local boy scouts are being hailed as heroes after their instincts and training for helping others kicked in when their Amtrak train derailed in Missouri as they were returning from a trip to New Mexico.

Two adults accompanying the 15 troops on a wilderness backtracking trip were injured in the June 27 mishap, with one of them having already been released from the hospital.

“I have a very distinct memory of being in the air right before I hit the ground thinking, there’s no way this is real, there’s no way this is actually happening to me, because this is how people die," Boy Scout Henry Gudzik of Appleton told WBAY. “I could die right now, and that can’t be happening to me."

“The whole thing was full of dust and smoke and the chairs were everywhere and stuff was everywhere,” added fellow member Eli Skrypczak. “I thought this can’t be real. Like, this is a dream. I’m like, what’s going on? This isn’t real. And I got up and those emergency windows are very hard to open. They took longer than they really should have.”

Three passengers and the driver of the dump truck the train collided with at the uncontrolled crossing were killed, and a GoFundMe account has been created to help the hospitalized adult traveling with the troops after the father of two of the scouts suffered a broken vertebrae.

“We were popping open emergency windows to let people out -- which are usually on the side of the train but were now up, so we had to pop the windows open and help people out, carry out people who couldn’t do it themselves," Boy Scout Isaiah Awe told WBAY. 

Skrypczak added, “Once we got out, we started pulling scouts out. And the windows were pretty high up, so we kind of just put some chairs down, put some cushions down. People climbed up, and we started getting people out, making sure they were OK and safe."

Another scout told WBAY that much of the assistance they provided amounted to sharing emotional support for those who felt shaken.

Some of the scouts suffered minor injuries, and everyone was taken to a hospital to be checked out.