This is a re-post of the bulletin I posted earlier, under Jay’s name, for the people who missed it. My husband, lil Jay passed away yesterday morning. The end of this month would have been our 1 year wedding anniversary. Funeral services probably won’t be for a few weeks, maybe early November. Here’s the re-post about what happened:

Jason has passed away. He died yesterday in Chehalis, Washington on our way from Seattle to Portland. We were on a freight train. The train pulled up and stopped in Tacoma, WA about 1:45am Sunday morning/Saturday night. He was climbing up on the cars to see if they’re ride-able. The train only stopped for less than a minute though. When it started to move, he said to hurry up and get on, it was Jay, me, and Whitney. Whitney got on the same place as him, while I was passing up his backpack, guitar, and train food to him. I ran back to get my backpack but the train was starting to speed up. I grabbed the ladder at the back end of the same car he was on, it was a 53 foot container. We all made it on safely, with all of our belongings. We rode south along the Puyallup River. The container on our car was blocking us apart, I couldn’t get to him until the train stopped. But we were both leaning over the side of the car yelling to each other “I love you, come up here when the train stops!” After almost an hour, maybe 2:30am, I laid down and went to sleep. The next thing I knew, I woke up to a flash light in my face at about 4:30am. It was the train conductor.

After talking to Whitney and the conductor, I guess this is what happened. They were still awake. They had gotten the sleeping bag out, but it was pulled down under the train, through a 3-4 foot hole in the bottom of the car. So Whitney went to go get the other blanket out. She said she was turned around, she felt a tap on her arm, she turned around and he was gone. She started getting hysterical, thought he was playing a trick on her. She told him to come out, stop hiding. But he was gone. She didn’t see him fall. The conductor in the train’s unit saw a signal come on, that the censors under the train had noticed something, thought it was probably equipment or something. So he stopped the train and walked back. We were in the 10th car from the front. He found Whitney sreaming and crying, hysterical and wondering if Jay and I were ever real at all. He took her up to the unit and left her there with the engineer and came back to see if I was there. He found me sleeping and walked me back to the end of the train, back to town, to the Chehalis Police Station where they told me that he had passed away. I didn’t believe them, they wouldn’t let me see him, they wouldn’t let me go.

They brought Whitney back to the station. Took statements from everyone. The coroner came and pronounced him dead, said that he had died instantly and didn’t feel a thing. That was about 5am on Sunday. They wanted to contact the police here and have them come contact Jay’s parents, but I knew that was a bad idea, as the police up here and Jay’s family don’t really get along. I got ahold of my mom. She arranged for me to get on a plane at 2:11, pacific time, where we were. And then she came up here, to Jay’s parent’s house. I arrived back in Michigan at midnight last night. This morning my mom brought me here, to Jay’s parents house. I guess the radio news station WJR announced the death. So I wanted to get the message out to everyone before it got through the grapevine, especially his closest friends, and he has a lot of them.

I can’t believe it, we’re all still in shock. The ashes should be here next week. His family wants to have a service at his uncle’s house. We don’t have plans yet for the funeral service. We want to work it so Jay’s brother, Elton and April can be here, they’re on tour in Georgia right now. Either e-mail us or call Jay’s parents, or me, for information on when we’ll have the service. When we find out, I’ll post another bulletin with the information.

I have all of his stuff that he had with him. I want to scan his notebook and a lot more pictures to make them available to everyone online. If you want, there are a lot of pictures of him here:
http://s35.photobucket.com/albums/d177/nappilyevrafter/
And I think you can order prints from photobucket. Either that, or e-mail the digital pictures to Walgreen’s or CVS and they’ll print them.

I guess it’s on the front page of the October 9th issue of the Washington Chronicle, out of Washington State. And it’s been on the news radio and on the tv news. If anyone can get information on the news reports, we’d all like copies.

Everyone, I’m so sorry. Hope you’re all ok.
Rosie