Death of Woman Hit by LRT Train Ruled Accident; She Had A 1-Year-Old Son

By
Ethan Oh
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Falling onto the train tracks is a terrifying concept and unfortunately, is what happened to a woman on 23 March 2023.

Mdm Wong Soon Heng was found dead that Thursday night on the LRT track at Cove station in Punggol. She had horrifyingly been run over by an LRT train, causing service on the Punggol line to stop.

Image: Instagram (@sgfollowsall)

Woman in Cove LRT Death Had Walked Off Platform

The 33-year-old was a Singapore Permanent Resident (PR) from Malaysia, married to her husband and with a son who was just one year old when she died.

Mdm Wong was 10 days into her new job as a senior accounting executive. She was appraised as hardworking and punctual, and due to being a recent joiner, she had not had much work to feel stressed out over.

A colleague who had worked with Mdm Wong for five years in her previous company said she was very positive and had a healthy relationship with her husband.

On the night of 23 March 2023, Mdm Wong attended a farewell dinner and drank a little bit of wine. She then headed home to Punggol, even messaging her husband about her mobile game success.

There’s something sobering about such a mundane activity right before tragedy.

At 10 pm, she alighted the LRT at Cove station, located on Punggol LRT’s east loop.

Image: Google Maps

The coroner’s findings on 8 August this year found her following move “unusual”, as instead of turning right to walk down the stairs, she continued to walk across the platform towards the other track.

He noted that her pace picked up as she walked until she appeared to nearly be running. Mdm Wong passed through the gap between the glass barriers and fell onto the LRT track.

A witness walking down the stairs then heard Mdm Wong yelp, and then a thud. He assumed someone had dropped something heavy like a suitcase onto the track, as he didn’t hear anyone calling for help.

Curious, he returned to the platform and found Mdm Wong lying face-up on the track, eyes open but “frozen still.”

The coroner stated that she had hit her head on the track and had likely been dazed by that.

A passenger used the LRT station intercom to alert the SBS Operations and Command Centre about someone on the track. They hit an emergency button to stop train movement at Cove.

Unfortunately, it was too late by then as an LRT train had run Ms Wong over 18 seconds after her fall. The coroner found this too short of a time for anyone to react and assist her.

Paramedics pronounced her dead at the scene from her injuries at 10:15 pm.

Image: Facebook (@Yeo Wan Ling)

Woman Was Not Suicidal or Intoxicated

As the above events were captured on CCTV footage, it was clear that nobody had shoved the woman to her death on the LRT tracks. As such, the coroner investigated other potential causes.

Mdm Wong’s husband and mother both said that she did not show signs of or express intentions to take her own life, describing their relationship as communicative.

She also had neither significant conflicts with either of them nor any financial issues at the time, leading the coroner to conclude that she did not have mental health issues.

The coroner also did not find it likely that the woman was intoxicated from her wine consumption, as at autopsy, the ethanol levels in her blood were too low to have contributed to her death at the LRT station.

Mdm Wong’s husband also claimed that she had not suffered from fainting or dizzy spells and was physically well after her son’s birth.

As such, the coroner concluded that it was not possible to determine why Mdm Wong ended up walking off the platform at increasing speeds and ruled it a tragic accident.

Deaths from falling onto LRT tracks are rare, with Mdm Wong being one of two in the last 10 years. The previous fatality occurred in March 2017 when a drunk man got on the tracks on the Bukit Panjang LRT line and was hit.

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Ethan Oh