As someone who lives nearby along the same line, all the Trainz along here are constantly on their horns before during and after any crossing.
From the news reports we are getting here this might have been a case where they thought they could have beat the train to the crossing. Not out of the sense of excitement or anything but because they had to get to a location to backup some other officers.
The reason the picture looks like it's in the middle of the desert is because I guess the train pushed the vehicle almost a half mile before coming to a stop.
I know the crossing and have been across it many times. It is an unmarked crossing, the engineers are on record as saying they saw them going up the side road and had an idea what was going to happen and leaned on their horns as they were going by so the officers should have known there was a train coming they may have just misjudged it's speed.
But yes it is a very sad thing, but I don't think the crew did it on purpose and I don't think the border patrol agents did it out of a sense of recklessness, I think they just misjudged the speed and that was unfortunate.
