I Would Title the Article "Jeanice McMillan Wins Posthumous Settlement for Reckless Negligence in Reporting"

Dear Washington Post Metro Section,

I realize you thought you were just "doing your job" when jumping on the "operator error" bandwagon the day after the tragic crash on the Red Line last Monday, despite having no evidence one way or the other to support such a theory - or any theory, actually. I have been dismayed (nay, disgusted) to constantly see you refer to "the operator" or "the driver" of the stopped train and to "the female operator" to refer to the impacting train - you know, so that we, the public can distinguish between a train conducter (a male, duh) and the person who caused the accident (the newbie lady-driver). You constantly refer to the operator of the impacting train as a novice and to her short time on the job. Yet from some of your initial reporting, there was universal support from her colleagues stating that she had first been a diligent and experienced bus driver who loved her job and her passengers tremendously and that she had gone through the required months of training to be a train operator. It isn't like Ms. McMillan didn't have experience operating major transportation equipment before she started driving trains. The woman irons her uniform everyday and yet you want to jump to the conclusion that she wasn't paying attention?

Now, you're insinuating that she was on the phone, while then reporting that her phone was in her bag.

In sum, you have been blaming - consciously or no - the operator from the word go, despite having zero evidence to support your theory which, while completely plausible, had as much evidentiary support at the time as a terrorist attack. Embarrassingly for you, bloggers did more investigative journalism questioning the driver's line of sight - see, e.g., http://www.farmfreshmeat.com/2009/06/could-operator-have-seen-train.html - and concluding from the obvious (because this person took the time to investigate the facts) that there was probably no way she could have seen the stopped the train and had enough time to stop hers. Although you initially reported as fact that Ms. McMillan did not apply the emergency brakes, the evidence is now clear that she did - and at about the distance where the blogger above posits she could first even have seen a stopped train.

What facts there are tell me the operator did everything by the book and your continued subtle sexist insinuations that as a new woman on the job, she was probably texting her friends instead of protecting her passengers not only needs to stop, but deserves an apology to this woman who tragically (and possibly inexcusably) lost her life due to what appears for all the world to be a fault of gross WMATA mismanagement and massive - and forseeable - equipment failure.

Shame on you, Washington Post.