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Assistant City Editor Warren Bates of The Las Vegas Review Journal was killed tragically in a train accident on Friday. The 49 year-old journalist was seven miles outside of the California ghost town of Amboy when a train broadsided his Toyota.
Witnesses say that they saw Bates traveling on Route 66 and pulling ahead of the train before he drove to the tracks and came to a stop just before 5 p.m. Due to the circumstances the California Highway Patrol is currently investigating the case as a possible suicide.
Bates worked for the Las Vegas Review Journal for his entire journalism career. He joined the newspaper as an intern in 1985 and worked his way up the old fashioned way, impressing his bosses with his hard work and fine writing style.
"What Warren Bates could do as an editor is what all editors should dream of doing -- strengthen copy within the writer's style," said Paul Harasim, who covers health and medical issues for the Review-Journal. "I used to tell him that he was the newspaper version of Maxwell Perkins, the greatest editor who ever lived. Perkins was the editor for Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, writers with incredibly different styles -- writers that he made better through editing."
Ched Whitney, the Review-Journal art director, said he was taken aback by the news. Earlier that week he, Bates and other colleagues had scheduled to get together for a game of poker. When Bates called in sick on Friday then didn't show up on Saturday colleagues began to worry.
"It's horrible," Whitney said. "But I think he was in the place that he loved best when he died," he said referring to Route 66.
No funeral plans have currently been announced.
Bates is survived by his father, Warren of San Jose, and his sister, Susana.
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