N.Y. / REGION

Recalling Victims of the Metro-North Crash

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The five men rode up front, whether out of preference or habit or for no good reason. They were going home from a day’s work. Finance work. Art work. Things like that.
The commonness of their commute became nightmarish when the Metro-North Railroad train carrying them plowed into a sport-utility vehicle stuck on the tracks at a Westchester County crossing during the frigid Tuesday evening rush. The five men died, as did the woman driving the crumpled car. She, too, had finished a day’s work.
The medical examiner was still in the process of definitively confirming the identities of the victims, so badly were the bodies burned. The driver, however, was identified by officials as Ellen Brody, a jewelry store worker, and one of the commuters was confirmed by friends as Eric M. Vandercar, a financial executive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art said it believed that Walter Liedtke, a curator of European paintings, was another victim.
Ms. Brody, 49, a married mother of three, worked at ICD Contemporary Jewelry, a shop in Chappaqua. She had been with the store for more than a decade, and was a bookkeeper and sales associate.
Ellen Brody
Co-workers said she left work at 6 on Tuesday evening, closing time, and was on her way to meet a friend in Scarsdale. Ms. Brody lived in the Edgemont section of Greenburgh. When she did not arrive home, one of her three daughters called one of her mother’s colleagues. Her husband, Alan, learned at 11 p.m. why she had not gotten home.
“She was the nicest, nicest person,” said Varda Singer, the owner of the jewelry store. “And she was a great mom, a great wife and a great worker. She was a person I called a saint. She was the most selfless person.”
Virginia Shasha, one of Ms. Brody’s co-workers, spent the night at the house with her daughters and husband. One daughter is in high school, one is in college and another has graduated from college.
“Their world has shattered,” Ms. Shasha said. She said of Ms. Brody that “she just loved people and always searched to bring out the best in them.”
She said that one of the first things Ms. Brody’s husband said was how he was “devastated for everybody.”
Ms. Brody was looking forward to celebrating her 50th birthday next month.
Walter LiedtkeCraig Ruttle/Associated Press 
His friends knew him as a first-car man. That was where you could be sure to find Eric Vandercar, 53, on the commuter train he took home from Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. “He was an orderly guy,” said Mark Rechler, a musician and architect who was a longtime friend. “He always sat in that first car. That was his car.”
He was a successful businessman, with expertise in municipal funding. Just last year, he moved from Morgan Stanley, where he had worked for nearly 27 years, to Mesirow Financial, a financial services firm based in Chicago. He was senior managing director and head of municipal funding. He kept his car at the Bedford Hills station for the short drive to his home, which he shared with his wife, Jill, and two children.
“He was a super-kind, generous, quiet man,” said Michael Weschler, a photographer and a friend of Mr. Vandercar. “Just the nicest guy you would ever meet.”
An abiding passion was music. “He lived large, and he was a huge music fan,” Mr. Rechler said.
He was what is known as a taper, who recorded hundreds of the frequent live music shows he attended, making the tapes available free on archive.org, an Internet repository. Mr. Rechler said Mr. Vandercar had something like 300 shows on the digital archive. His favorite band was probably moe., a jam band, and he was a devotee of the Radiators, a New Orleans jazz band.
He and his wife were regulars at venues like Brooklyn Bowl and B.B. King Blues Club, and they would attend the New Orleans Jazz Festival.
Eric Vandercar
He was also an avid skier, favoring Park City, Utah, and was a skilled scuba diver.
Mr. Vandercar’s wife did not want to comment on Wednesday. In the morning, she had had to tell her children that their father would not be coming home.
Her eyes were red from weeping as she hugged mourners who stopped by the family home on the slope of a gentle, snowy ridge in Bedford Hills. A dozen cars clogged the long driveway. There was a basketball hoop out front, a white wooden fence in back that wound to the edge of a forest. A woman carrying a box of food down the slippery street had to rest it on her raised knee several times so that she could blot her tears.
Walter Liedtke, 69, was a first-car man because, as he told friends, he found peace there.
His life was always an interesting juxtaposition. His activities on Monday perfectly illustrated that. At 5:30 a.m., he sat behind the wheel of his pickup truck, plowing snow from the country lane in Bedford Hills where he lived with his wife, Nancy. Four hours later, he was leading a tour of Rembrandt paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“He was a very elegant man; he loved his life,” said Ursula LaMott, who for 33 years rented the Liedtkes a house near a horse stable behind her converted farmhouse. For many years, Mr. Liedtke and his wife kept a pair of horses in the barn. Some mornings he baled hay before heading to Manhattan to describe the textures of paintings by Johannes Vermeer.
“He was an intellectual,” Ms. LaMott’s husband, Tom LaMott, said. “He never mentioned retirement. He loved what he was doing.”
Worldly as he was, he was always hungry to learn new things. He spent his time on the train reading. And so he had a firm preference.
“He liked riding in the front of the train,” Ms. LaMott said. “It’s the quiet car.”
Correction: February 4, 2015 
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the New York community where Eric M. Vandercar’s family lives. It is Bedford Hills, not Bedford Falls.
Nate Schweber, Marc Santora and Lisa W. Foderaro contributed reporting.