The Fresh York Times
November 22, 2016
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Jasmine Mateen was standing outside her home here on Tuesday afternoon when her cellphone went off: Two of her daughters, who were injured when their school bus crashed on Monday, were being discharged from the hospital.
The news pulled her shortly from her trouble. Moments before, Ms. Mateen had been talking about her 6-year-old daughter Zyaira, the chick with the fresh leopard-print glaze, who died in the same bus crash that injured two of Ms. Mateen’s other daughters.
“My baby’s coming home, but her sister’s dead,” Ms. Mateen said as a single rip flipped down her left cheek.
“Even tho’ she was the one who told me my baby was dead, I just didn’t want to believe it,” she said of her other 6-year-old, Zasmyn. The third daughter on board, Zacauree’A Brown, is Ten. “I couldn’t believe it. You know how you attempt to hold on to hope?”
This city, just north of Tennessee’s border with Georgia, reeled on Tuesday as it coped with the grim toll of the deadly school bus crash. The authorities said that at least five Woodmore Elementary School students — four damsels and a boy — had died, and that twelve others were still hospitalized. Six of the children were in intensive care.
Elsewhere in Chattanooga, the bus driver, Johnthony K. Walker, 24, was jailed and charged with vehicular homicide after the authorities said he had recklessly sped and swerved during his afternoon route.
“We are heartbroken for all of our students and their families,” said Kirk Kelly, the interim schools superintendent in Hamilton County. “Yesterday was the worst day that we have had for Woodmore and for Hamilton County Schools that I can recall in my life as an educator and as a parent and as a member of this community.”
Three of the students who died were in the fourth grade. The other children who were killed were in kindergarten and very first grade, Dr. Kelly said, but he did not identify the students.
“They will always be with us across our lives,” he said. “This is something that we will never leave behind here as a community.”
The bus was eliminated from the scene on Tuesday, and crews worked along the blocked street to restore the utility pole that the police said Mr. Walker had struck. A petite memorial of tucked animals and flowers took form, and investigators reviewed the crash site.
The National Transportation Safety Board opened an investigation, and it will be months before federal officials reach any conclusions. But the Chattanooga authorities moved quickly to assign blame, and in an arrest affidavit issued on Tuesday, a police officer wrote that Mr. Walker had been driving “at a high rate of speed, well above the posted speed limit of thirty m.p.h.”
Eventually, the police said, Mr. Walker “lost control of the bus” and swerved off the narrow roadway. The bus, which ultimately landed on its side, struck a mailbox, an elevated driveway, a tree and a telephone pole.
The officer, explaining the decision to charge Mr. Walker with vehicular homicide and other crimes, cited “the reckless nature” of his driving, as well as “his very high speed and weaving within his lane.” Tests for drugs and alcohol are pending, Chief Fred Fletcher of the Chattanooga Police Department said in an interview on Tuesday.
The bus driver, Johnthony Walker, 24, in a booking photo released by the Chattanooga Police after he was charged with vehicular homicide.
Chattanooga Police Dept., via Reuters
Federal investigators say they expect to interview Mr. Walker, who received his commercial driver’s license in April and was involved in a minor bus crash in September.
Mr. Walker’s employer, Durham School Services, which holds a contract to bus thousands of Hamilton County students each day, said in a statement that it was “devastated by the accident.” The statement did not address questions about the company’s hiring practices, nor did it react to reports that parents, including Ms. Mateen, had complained about Mr. Walker.
A criminal history report from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation indicated that Mr. Walker had no arrests before the crash on Monday, but State Department of Safety and Homeland Security records showcased that his license was suspended shortly in two thousand fourteen for an insurance disturbance.
No one answered the door at Mr. Walker’s apartment on Tuesday morning, when a woman who said she was a co-worker attempted to slip a note under his door.
The safety record of Durham, which is based near Chicago and says it transports more than a million schoolchildren in communities around the country each day, was also under scrutiny on Tuesday. A federal regulator, in statistics published late last month, said the company had received ten “driver fitness violations” over the course of two years — a figure better than only a fraction of other similarly sized transportation companies.
The federal Department of Transportation said Durham’s drivers had been involved in three hundred forty six accidents in two years, but the statistics did not distinguish whether the company’s employees were to blame for the wrecks. And albeit federal officials had flagged Durham for its record on driver fitness, the company had not drawn special attention for a history of unsafe driving. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said the company had a “satisfactory” safety rating.
A company spokeswoman did not react to emailed questions, but the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, Christopher A. Hart, said the panel would look into the company during its investigation.
Student fatalities aboard school buses are uncommon in the United States, where an estimated twenty five million children use them daily. In a May report that examined crash data inbetween two thousand five and 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that fifty three school-age children had died in accidents while they were railing in what the government classified as “school transportation vehicles.”
Emotions were raw on Tuesday outside Woodmore, where Demetrius Jenkins stood around daybreak and thought about how he had not yet told his son about the crash.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Mr. Jenkins said while students ran, walked and skipped toward the school for their final day of classes before Thanksgiving break. The school district said that about one hundred of Woodmore’s approximately three hundred fifteen students were in their classrooms on Tuesday.
The crash occurred about sixteen months after a gunman opened fire at two military sites in Chattanooga, killing five servicemen.
“Five is a cursed number in our city right now, and so we are again dealing with unimaginable loss,” Mayor Andy Berke said. “The most unnatural thing in the world is for a parent to mourn the loss of a child. There are no words that can bring convenience to a mother or a father.”
Jonah Engel Bromwich contributed reporting from Fresh York. Susan Beachy contributed research.