Accident

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Sunday, April 5, 1992

The Record (New Jersey) | All Editions | NEWS | A01

At a most difficult hour in his grief Saturday, Bob Gruber embraced a tearful Mike Vitacco, his son’s best friend, consoling him, as he did some 100 boys and girls who had come to bid their friend goodbye.

His wife, Patricia, was at his side, and they were seeing their son for the first time since he was killed in an accident Thursday night.

Patricia Gruber, adjusting one boy’s jacket, exhorted him to “remember Bobby as he was.”

She said she was saddened at seeing her son’s body Saturday and that the family agonized over whether the casket should be open whether the children should see him like that. The youngsters, between 11 and 15 years old, from the Roy W. Brown Middle School in Bergenfield, cried inconsolably.

“I will miss all his friends that he grew up with,” the 44-year-old Bergenfield woman said. “He lived life, every minute, to the fullest. He was looking forward to the summer, to the nice weather, because he was born in June.”

Robert R. Gruber, 13, was killed Thursday in what his father called “a freak accident.” The eighth-grader was struck and killed by an NJ Transit commuter train in East Rutherford as he returned from training for a dirt-bike race.

Saturday and Sunday were for his friends, Mrs. Gruber said. The first wave of about 25 Bergenfield middle school students arrived and filled up the room at the Riewerts Memorial Home. Michael Restrepo, 11, Jerit Sciorra, 13, Anthony Christiano, 12, Michael Lopez, 11, and Danielle Wilson, 13, were there. Toula Psathas, 11, remembered sitting a table away from Bobby at lunch one day and how kind and friendly he was. They became friends.

Jen Heffernan, 15, met Bobby Gruber through a friend and hung out, listening to music, with him.

“I will miss being with him,” she said. “He was caring. If you had a problem, he would talk to you, anytime. He was fun to be with.”

Mike Vitacco said his best friend since first grade had a puckish sense of humor and loved to make people laugh. They called him Urkel after a character on a television sitcom because he wore funny, colorful clothes. Bobby Gruber would do anything for anyone, especially girls.

He loved girls.

So his parents, who had grown accustomed to hearing adults and children alike tell them what a joy it was to be around their son, consoled and were consoled by his friends, their parents, and teachers from the school on Saturday. The children had gone to the Grubers home the night before. They had sat in Bobby’s room, talked with his parents, and talked about what he meant to them. Each one left with a photograph of their friend.

A smile played across Patricia Gruber’s face as she recalled how her son first became enamored of dirt bikes and motocross racing. He watched motocross racing on television as a young boy.

“When he was 7, he said, `Mom, when can I get one? I said maybe when he turned 12. He never forgot I said that,” and asked again as soon as he turned 12, Mrs. Gruber said.

The family lives on a dead-end with a field and woods in the back. They found out that Bobby, who switched from football to basketball about a year ago, had been borrowing a dirt bike and riding it in the field in back of the house, without all the proper equipment. His mother and father decided to buy him the bike and all the right gear. Under the watchful eyes of his father, he trained, which was the way his mother wanted it.

Bobby took part in his first competitive race a week ago, and was to have competed Saturday in a motocross race in Walden, N.Y. He usually trained in Jersey City with a group from Bergenfield. But on the day he died, the group’s plans changed and they went instead to the meadowlands in East Rutherford.

They parked in the street, walked about a half-mile into the meadow, then rode alongside the raised railroad tracks. About 6 p.m., Gruber told his son it was windy and cold, that he would head back to the trucks, that the others could join him later.

He was a good distance ahead when Bobby came up, wanting to take his father to the trucks.

“Dad, let me ride you on my bike, let me take you partway,” he told his father.

“I never let him ride me on his bike. It’s a small bike and it’s a race bike. It wasn’t good for the bike,” Gruber said. He told his son to go back and join the others, that he would see him later.

Bobby, following two other bikes, would pass his father twice as he rode around practicing.
“He was doing great moves, happy as a lark,” his father said.

Gruber would not see his son alive again. The next time he saw him was in a casket at the Bergenfield funeral home.

Most of the ride alongside the railroad track was dirt, wobbly but safe, he said but at one point, to cross over a culvert on railroad property between the Hackensack River bridge and the Route 3 overpass, he would have to ride close to the tracks. The train, returning to the Hoboken station carrying no passengers, apparently sideswiped the boy.

“It was an extreme coincidence to be in that corner at that time,” Gruber said. “He ended being on top of the culvert at the time, such a brief instant that he was exposed to danger and it happened.”

When asked what they would miss most about Bobby Gruber, one of his friends said they would miss “just being with him.”

Visiting continues today from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. Services will be Monday at 10 a.m. at the Teaneck United Methodist Church, with burial in George Washington Memorial Park.

Caption: PHOTO – Bobby Gruber posing proudly with his dirt bike in a family photograph.

Notes: Bergen page only

ID: 17373490 | Copyright © 1992, The Record (New Jersey)