A Jacksonville firefighter and his nurse wife survived a high-speed train collision in central Spain Wednesday that killed at least 68 people, then turned around and helped treat critically injured passengers before focusing on getting their family home. Josue Garcia-Otero, a Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department firefighter, and his wife, Diamary Garcia, a nurse, were traveling with six other relatives on a family trip following a wedding when the crash occurred.
According to First Coast News, Garcia-Otero said he and his wife treated critically injured passengers after reaching safety. JFRD did not identify which of the two trains the couple's family was aboard, but confirmed that Garcia-Otero and his family are safe. Fire Chief Percy Golden II said Garcia-Otero and his wife went to work only after making sure their own family was out of danger.
Garcia-Otero has served with JFRD for four years and is assigned to the department's critical care team, made up of its most highly trained paramedics, the station's report notes. He was featured in JFRD's Hispanic Heritage Month series earlier in October, where he said the observance honors values passed down by his grandparents, especially caring for others. The couple and their relatives are now focused on returning home, per JFRD.
How the Collision Unfolded
The crash happened when a Renfe train rear-ended a stopped Iryo train in Toledo province south of Madrid, according to the Associated Press. Renfe is Spain's state-owned railway operator, while Iryo is a private railway company; both trains were traveling the route between Madrid and Seville, as reported by The New York Times. The collision site sat in farmland between the towns of Urda and Los Yébenes.
Spain's transport minister, Óscar Puente, blamed an order from the country's central rail command for the collision, saying the train engineers themselves were not at fault. Per the Times, an automatic train control system near the crash site went down because of a computer failure at about 8:30 a.m. local time, disabling the safety system along roughly 63 kilometers of track and halting every train on the affected stretch. At 8:36 a.m., the decision was made to allow the Renfe train to resume its journey as normal despite a red signal, and it struck the stationary Iryo train at 8:53 a.m.
Casualties, Speed and Scale of the Response
The Castilla-La Mancha regional government confirmed the death toll at 68 and said 58 more people were receiving hospital treatment, according to Euronews. Authorities had not established the Renfe train's exact speed at the time of impact, though Puente said it could have reached up to 200 kilometers per hour. The impact knocked two Iryo cars off the track, and rail service was suspended between Madrid, Ciudad Real and Andalusia.
More than 500 emergency personnel were deployed to the site, CNN reported, as rescue crews searched the wreckage for survivors and bodies. Spain's military emergency unit joined firefighters, police and medical crews at the scene, while ambulances and medical helicopters shuttled to and from the crash site. Passenger totals have varied across outlets: the Guardian reported the two trains were believed to be carrying 544 people combined, DW reported roughly 540 people including 378 on the Renfe train and 147 on the Iryo train, and Nine News reported 397 passengers on the Renfe train and 147 on the Iryo train.
A Grim Echo of January's Crash
Wednesday's collision was described by the Times as one of the deadliest train crashes in Spanish history. It came less than a year after a January crash near Adamuz in southern Spain, in which an Iryo train derailed and struck an oncoming Renfe train, killing 46 people, as reported by The Guardian. That January crash was described by the Times as Spain's deadliest since a 2013 crash that killed 80 people, though Nine News put the January death toll at 45 and offered the same comparison to the 2013 disaster. Reports also diverge on how to count 2026's toll: the Associated Press called Wednesday's wreck Spain's second deadly rail crash this year, while CNN described it as the third rail disaster in the country in 2026.
Spain's dedicated high-speed lines opened in 1992 and, according to the Guardian's reporting, had not seen a fatal crash before this year. Train travel in the country grew 40 percent between 2019 and 2024, and 25 million passengers rode a high-speed train in Spain in just the first half of this year. The Spanish government says it has increased spending on railway network maintenance by 54 percent since taking power in 2018, the Guardian notes — a statistic now drawing fresh scrutiny as investigators examine why the Renfe train was cleared to resume normal service without a speed restriction after the system failure.
