HOUSTON - LaShonda Gordon says she is nothing more than a scapegoat for Metro.

“Somebody had to be the fallout and it was me,” Gordon added.

She was the operator of the Metro light rail train that went on to the wrong track near the Smith Lands station in the Reliant Astrodome area on May 9.

Gordon is telling her story here for the first time.

“I blew my horn,” she remembered. “He gave me a proceed sign to come through and I did. I crossed over from Track 1 to Track 2 and I thought ‘I don’t remember getting a command to crossover.’”

She didn’t get one.

As 11 News first reported, a crew was working on the switch and mistakenly left it open causing Gordon’s northbound light rail train, carrying 180 passengers, to move over to the southbound track.

“I’m trying to call on the radio but there were a lot of people on the radio at this time,” Gordon recalled as soon as she crossed over. “I don’t know who was talking or what but I couldn’t get through. So I called them on my cell phone.”

Her personal cell phone, a pink Sanyo, is how Metro found out.

When our story prompted the transit agency to call a news conference on May 21, Metro bragged its redundant safety procedures prevented disaster.

Not true.

Gordon’s call evidently did.

The switch crew didn’t realize the mistake, neither did the flagger and the Metro controller at Transtar never noticed the train on the wrong track.

Of all those people, LaShonda Gordon, the only one to apparently recognize the problem, was also the only one fired.

Metro Spokeswoman Raequel Roberts said the agency’s Transtar controller is still suspended. She added that others involved might still be disciplined, too.

But Gordon filed a federal discrimination complaint this week and is also considering suing, wanting a second chance like she says Metro gave everyone else.