Suit Blames BART in Killing of 74-Year-Old Rider Who Was Shoved Into Train

The family of a woman who died last summer after being pushed into the side of a moving BART train in downtown San Francisco is suing the agency for what their attorneys call a “complete failure” to keep riders safe from crime and other dangers.

Corazon Dandan, 74, of Daly City, was returning home from her job as a telephone operator at a downtown hotel the night of July 1 when a man on the platform at BART’s Powell Street station shoved her into a moving train, according to police. Dandan suffered severe head injuries and died less than an hour later at San Francisco General Hospital.

BART police arrested Trevor Belmont, 49, who was later charged with murder, inflicting great bodily injury on a vulnerable person and a special circumstance of lying in wait.

The suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court on behalf of one of Dandan’s nephews and half a dozen of her siblings blames her death on what it calls BART’s long-term failure to effectively address crime and fare evasion on the system.

The suspect in the case had been arrested at least five times by BART police since 2018, the suit notes, and had fare-evaded into the system the night Dandan was killed.

Dandan’s death “does not constitute an unforeseeable accident but rather is a direct result of the violence that BART has ignored and enabled throughout their stations through its negligent conduct,” the suit says.

The complaint goes on to recite a long series of public safety and security lapses at the agency over the past decade. Those include the disclosure after a fatal shooting aboard a train in 2016 that most of what looked like surveillance cameras on BART cars were merely empty shells.

The suit also cites a November 2024 letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom from the Bay Area Council business group and dozens of public officials across the region calling for increasing police presence on BART by deploying California Highway Patrol officers. Newsom declined to take action on the request.

The complaint lists incidents in which riders have fallen, jumped or been pushed onto the tracks, arguing that BART has been negligent in failing to adopt measures such as platform barrier doors to prevent such incidents.

Reached by email on Wednesday, BART officials declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The agency has been under fire for years because of fare evasion and high-profile crimes like the still-unsolved 2016 shooting that exposed its dummy cameras, the 2018 murder of Oakland teenager Nia Wilson and the fatal stabbing of a passenger in 2019 in a confrontation that began with a dispute over a pair of shoes.

In recent years, BART has also heard a drumbeat of complaints about filthy cars and stations and the increasing presence of riders who are using drugs or in the middle of a mental health episode. Safety and “quality of life” concerns among patrons have often been cited as one of the reasons BART has been slow to recover ridership in the wake of the pandemic.

Partly on its own initiative and partly at the prodding of state legislators, BART has launched a “safe and clean plan” that aims to address customer concerns.

The program includes redeploying police officers to increase their presence in trains and stations, hiring crisis intervention specialists to address riders experiencing mental health or other problems, installing new fare gates at all 50 stations by the end of this year and doubling down on efforts to keep the system clean.