ORONO, Maine — A grieving friend of a missing Maine Maritime Academy student has issued a plea for people to stop walking on a railroad bridge that crosses the Stillwater River near where David Breunig was last seen on Feb. 26.
“You think you can never fall,” Jack K. Gilligan of Westbrook wrote in a posting on Facebook this week. “Let me tell you, it can happen to you. If [Breunig], one of the most athletic people I know, can slip and fall, then you can slip and fall. The fall and the river are unforgiving.
“The sight of both haunt me,” stated Gilligan, who declined to be interviewed for this story but gave the Bangor Daily News permission to reprint his post.
Divers spent two days last week searching the Penobscot River near where it connects with the Stillwater based on the possibility Breunig fell from the bridge and ended up in the water. Aerial and ground searches have focused along stretches of both rivers with no sign of him as of Thursday morning.
Gilligan, a third-year student at the University of Maine, wrote in the post that he has crossed the bridge “100-plus times, mostly at night” and others have done so as well.
People should not walk across the span because it is dangerous and against the law, Nate Moulton, director of rail programs for the Maine Department of Transportation, said Wednesday.
“It is illegal to get on any railroad track without permission from the railroad,” he said, adding fines start at $100, jump to $500 for a second offense and to $1,000 for a third trespassing offense.
In addition to the dangers of train traffic, most train trestles and bridges, including the one that crosses the Stillwater River in town, do not have walkways.
“They aren’t built to be walked on safely,” Moulton said. “There are gaps and spacing. When railroad employees are out there, they’re tied off. It’s not a safe environment to be in.”
There were 526 fatalities in the U.S. resulting from persons trespassing on railroad tracks and property in 2014, a 21.8 percent increase over the 432 in 2013, according to Federal Railroad Administration statistics posted on the Maine Operation Lifesaver Inc. website. The data did not indicate the number of deaths involving bridges or trestles. There were three trespassing fatalities in Maine, all involving people struck by on-track equipment owned by Amtrak in York and Cumberland counties.
Orono Police Chief Josh Ewing said his officers typically issue a warning to those found on the railroad bridge. No one has been charged with trespassing on the span in the past year, he said.
“We have only warned people, and I don’t believe we’ve caught any repeat offenders,” the police chief said in an email Wednesday.
“It is a civil violation for the first two violations, then becomes criminal on the third violation,” he said later.
Ewing said he could not recall ever heading out to the bridge for an injury and after talking with others determined that “it’s been 20 years or so since anyone fell” and it was reported.
Gilligan, who met Breunig while playing youth baseball in their hometown of Westbrook, wrote that his friend visited and stayed at his apartment every weekend.
Breunig, 21, was at a party on Crosby Street the night he disappeared but as it neared midnight he decided to head over to the Mill Street bars to meet up with friends, police said. He left the party alone at around 11:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 26, and his phone last pinged a local cellphone tower at 12:05 a.m. Feb. 27, officials have said.
The shortest route from Crosby Street to Mill Street is by crossing the train bridge over the Stillwater River. Breunig was last seen walking toward the train tracks.
The thought of losing his friend in a way that can be prevented spurred Gilligan to reach out to friends, the community and visitors.
“Please do not travel at night alone and above all else please stay off the trestle bridge that crosses the Stillwater River in Orono,” he wrote. “We always knew the risks, but when you’re a 20-something y/o college student you think it can never happen to you.”
His missing friend — a junior at MMA — is proof that it can happen to anyone, Gilligan said
“Every time you cross that bridge you are playing a game of odds,” he said. “You’re playing a game of chance. Your life — that is not worth shaving off those 15 extra minutes it takes to get to the bars or to that party across the river.”
Losing Breuning “hurts, it hurts a lot,” Gilligan wrote.
“So please don’t put your hometown through what mine is going through, don’t put your friends through what [Breunig’s] friends and I are going through, and especially don’t put your family through what the Breunig family is going through,” Gilligan wrote.
He ends the post by saying that he and his friends have learned a hard lesson and he hopes to prevent future tragedies by asking people to take the proper route.
“I want to make our community a safer and happier place,” Gilligan wrote. “So please think of this next time you think about walking across that bridge. We can’t afford to lose any more people like [Breunig] … he is one in a billion and so are you.”