If you're charged with drunkenly stumbling down train tracks with your pre-teen son, you can be brought to trial, court rules

The Supreme Judicial Court today ordered a trial for a man charged with reckless endangerment of a child after he was allegedly caught drunkenly stumbling down the Kingston/Plymouth Line with his 11-year-old son.

A district-court judge had tossed the charge - but left standing another criminal complaint for violating a law against walking on train tracks - saying prosecutors had failed to prove that David Coggeshall knew he was putting his son at risk as they ambled down the tracks in 2013.

The state's highest court ruled, in essence: Please.

In overturning the dismissal of the charge, the justices noted Coggeshall had admitted to walking on the tracks in the past, that he was so drunk - or as he allegedly told police, "fucked up" - that he not only had to lean on his son to stay upright and that at one point he still fell down right in the middle of the tracks:

By enlisting the aid of his son to violate this law, he encouraged the boy to violate the same law. It is well known that "[a] railroad track is a place of danger, and one, unnecessarily and voluntarily going upon it or so near to it as to be in a position of peril, must take active measures of precaution." Joyce v. New York, New Haven & Hartford R.R. Co., 301 Mass. 361, 365 (1938). This alone constitutes a substantial risk of serious bodily injury, and a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the situation. Matters did not improve. At one point the defendant fell between the tracks. Not only did he expose his son to the danger of walking alongside the tracks, but had a train approached while he was lying between the tracks, it is reasonably likely that the boy would have tried valiantly and desperately to remove his father to safety, thereby exacerbating the risk to his own safety and life. We conclude that the evidence supports probable cause to believe that the defendant exposed his son to a risk that no reasonable person would have permitted, namely, a substantial risk of serious personal injury.

Yes, the justices continued, the state law on child endangerment requires proof that a person was aware he was committing "wanton or reckless" behavior. The fact that Hoggeshall allegedly had been on the tracks, on which trains still run before, the fact that he allegedly admitted to police he was drunk and the fact that he was holding his son's hand were probable cause enough for authorities to charge him with the crime, they concluded.