Anchorage Daily News

After trick-or-treating Saturday night with her great-grandsons -- one Spider-Man and one ninja -- Joyce Kusmider left her family to shoot photos at Potter Marsh, her daughter said.

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Joyce Kusmider

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There'd been beautiful sunsets lately, and the 72-year-old retired waitress loved to capture trees, landscapes and animals with her digital camera. That was at about 6:15 p.m., said Kusmider's daughter, Peggy Guanlao.

Anchorage Police and an Alaska Railroad investigator are now piecing together what happened next.

Police identified Kusmider Sunday as the woman hit and killed at roughly 7 p.m. by an Alaska Railroad coal train, a quarter mile south of Rabbit Creek rifle range. The train engineer saw a flash of light, and then a person, just before impact, said police spokesman Lt. Dave Parker.

Authorities found a camera with Kusmider's body, and Parker suspects she was simply caught off guard while taking pictures. He'd noticed the spectacular Anchorage sunset that night himself, he said.

The collision comes four months after an Anchorage man and his dog were hit by a passenger train north of Wasilla while trying to save his Labrador retriever from running on the tracks.

"You may think you're far enough off the track when you're not," Parker said. "Another possibility is you may think the train is farther away than it is, or that it surprises you and you freeze."

The edge of the train's snowplow struck Kusmider a matter of seconds after employees on the train spotted her about 200 feet away, said railroad spokeswoman Wendy Lindskoog.

Kusmider was standing on the Inlet side of the tracks and didn't move as the train began to brake, Lindskoog said. It took the engine about a quarter mile to stop.

Kusmider told family she couldn't hear out of her left ear, Guanlao said, but the daughter doesn't know if hearing loss played a role in the collision.

"She had no problem hearing us," she said.

Her mother moved from Pennsylvania to Alaska, kids in tow, after a divorce in 1968. Kusmider's adult children still live in Anchorage, where she'd recently moved from Cordova to stay with family, Guanlao said.

"You're talking a woman that raised six kids by herself," she said. "She worked the oil spill, Exxon Valdez spill. She worked on the pipeline. I mean she was a hard-working woman her whole life."

Kusmider liked travel. She didn't care for television. Better to talk to someone than watch TV, Guanlao said.

Asked for some of Kusmider's photos Sunday, the family shared snapshots she took of an orange Alaska sunset, a bridge spanning the Copper River and snowy Potter Marsh.

"She loved being by the water," said her daughter.

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