Calif. teen killed trying to retrieve phone from tracks

Crew members say they spotted two people get off the tracks and one person return. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Yet another person has died after putting her phone's safety ahead of her own. Jenna Betti, 14, was killed by a freight train on Sunday when she tried to retrieve a phone she had dropped on the tracks in Martinez, Calif., reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

She had been sitting on the tracks with her boyfriend when the train approached. A rep for the railway says the conductor sounded a whistle as the train rounded a corner, and the crew did see the pair exit the tracks, reports the Contra Costa Times.

Then "one of the individuals came back on the track." "She didn't judge the approach, and the train creates a vacuum, we were told, and it sucks you in," the eighth-grader's mother says.

"We are beyond devastated." Adds her brother, "I can't really put myself in her shoes, but I think she wasn't really thinking, and didn't really think twice, and she just reacted and tried to get her phone as quick as she could." Family members and friends have left flowers at a growing memorial beside the tracks, reports ABC 7.

Earlier this year, two men died after trying to retrieve a phone dropped in the Chicago River, and last week, a Texas man died after going back into a burning house for his phone.

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