Last month in Los Angeles, on September 12, a commuter train collided head-on with a freight one, killing 25 people and injuring approximately 130. The crash, which was the nation’s deadliest commuter train accident in 36 years, involved a northbound Metrolink train with 225 passengers and a freight train in Chatsworth, a residential district in San Fernando Valley.

Preliminary federal investigations had shown at that time that a Metrolink engineer had failed to stop at a red signal, thus being responsible for the collision.

This Wednesday, investigators have informed that only 22 seconds before the dreadful crash, the engineer, named Robert M. Sanchez, had been sending a text message on his cellphone. They have yet to determine whether he had been doing so at the exact time of the accident.

The phone’s records have revealed that the last message had been received at 4:21:03 (more than sixty seconds prior to the crash), while the final sent one had been at 4:22:01.

Twenty-two seconds after, the two trains, both travelling at a speed of 40 miles per hour, crashed into each other.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which is currently looking into the accident, has stated that they have not yet determined the cause of the collision, adding that the tracks, signals, brakes and locomotives had all been working properly.

The possibility that the crash was caused by the engineer who was texting has prompted the California Public Utilities Commission, an institution that supervises rail safety, to issue an order that forbids the use of cellphones by train operators in all cases except emergency ones.