Engineer in Metro-North Crash Is Called Responsible and Kind Eric Thayer/Reuters William Rockefeller after a train he was driving derailed in the Bronx. RHINEBECK, N.Y. - His name may be Rockefeller, but he is from a humble branch of the family whose first arrival in America was an 18th-century immigrant from Rockenfeld, Germany, not from the branch that made the name a synonym for vast wealth. William Rockefeller grew up here among scrappy boys and young men who revel in muscular motorcycles and snowmobiles, tinker with car engines and pickup trucks, volunteer for fire companies and yearn to work on the railroad. The Amtrak station is a mainstay of this picturesque Hudson River town, and the Poughkeepsie station 20 miles south is the northern terminus of the Hudson line of the Metro-North Railroad, one of the largest local sources of well-paid blue-collar jobs. Mr. Rockefeller, 46, counted himself fortunate a decade ago to land one of the best of those jobs, as a locomotive engineer, eventually making $145,575 a year. But his railroad dreams were shattered on Sunday when he was driving an early-morning Hudson line train at 82 miles an hour, not within the speed limit of 30, as it came to a sharp bend in the tracks in the Bronx. The cars tumbled off the track, killing four passengers and injuring more than 70 others. He has been suspended without pay, and his handling of the train is being investigated by the Bronx district attorney's office. Mr. Rockefeller's lawyer, Jeffrey P. Chartier, and his union representatives say he may have nodded off, lulled by the train's hypnotic motion. Nevertheless, neighbors and friends in this Dutchess County town, where he grew up and lived until a few years ago, say they are puzzled by the impression the crash evoked of a reckless or negligent man. "Bill is a very sincere, hardworking, dedicated person - he's not a hell-raiser," said James O. Reardon, the mayor of the Village of Rhinebeck, who knows the family. Far from intemperate, the Billy Rockefeller they knew, these friends say, was a remarkably kind person who would go out of his way to shovel a frail or elderly neighbor's driveway or to fix a car's windshield wipers and, as a volunteer firefighter, once helped rescue a resident of a burning building. "I'm reading articles that say he liked living on the edge," said Wayne Martin, a retired X-ray technician who lives next door to Mr. Rockefeller's parents and whose son also works for Metro-North. That's the furthest thing from the truth. I never saw him speeding. Mr. Martin added, "If you called him up and needed help, he'd come across the yard before you hung up the phone." Mr. Martin said Mr. Rockefeller had the misfortune of witnessing another harrowing accident 15 years ago when he and a friend, Will Berry, a Metro-North mechanical engineer, were riding motorcycles on a country road and a deer ran across their path. Mr. Berry was thrown and suffered a fatal head injury. Several friends mentioned the 1998 accident as an example of what Mr. Rockefeller had endured, not of his recklessness. Mr. Chartier said speed was not a factor in that accident. A check of Dutchess County files since 1993 shows no criminal record for Mr. Rockefeller. Kirstin King, who was in Mr. Rockefeller's 1986 graduating class at Rhinebeck Central High School, said she was upset that having had to live with the memory of that earlier tragedy he now would have to live with this one. "This is someone I would depend my life on," she said, her voice breaking. I think he had enough compassion for all his friends when they needed him. That's a pretty unusual thing to say about a teenager. He wasn't reckless. He wasn't a carouser. He was just a good-hearted man. In 2010, the broad-shouldered Mr. Rockefeller married Catherine Robideau, a woman he had dated for three years. He now lives with her about 15 miles north in Germantown in her gray wood-frame house. The house was refinanced in 2012 for $318,000, according to Germantown records. Reporting was contributed by Jesse McKinley from Germantown, N.Y., and Matt Flegenheimer, Patrick McGeehan and Sheelagh McNeill from New York.