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Chattanooga School Bus Speeding Before Deadly Crash, Officials Say Dead Children and a Crumpled School Bus Leave Chattanooga Dazed
(about 3 hours later)
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — A school bus driver was speeding and swerving when he crashed on Monday, killing at least five students, the authorities said, in one of the deadliest school bus accidents in recent years. 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.
In an arrest affidavit that the Hamilton County General Sessions Court released on Tuesday, the authorities said the driver, Johnthony K. Walker, 24, had been driving at “a high rate of speed, well above the posted speed limit of 30 miles per hour” at the time of the wreck. Mr. Walker has been charged with five counts of vehicular homicide. The news pulled her briefly from her grief. Moments before, Ms. Mateen had been talking about her 6-year-old daughter Zyaira, the girl with the new leopard-print coat, who died in the same bus crash that injured two of Ms. Mateen’s other daughters.
“Mr. Walker lost control of the bus and swerved off the roadway to the right, striking an elevated driveway and mailbox, swerved to the left and began to overturn, striking a telephone pole and a tree,” said the court filing. It said Mr. Walker was being charged because of “the reckless nature” of his driving. “My baby’s coming home, but her sister’s dead,” Ms. Mateen said as a single tear rolled down her left cheek.
Details of the crash emerged Tuesday as Woodmore Elementary School, whose student body is mostly impoverished, began a day of mourning. Thirty-seven students were on board the bus when it crashed, and Kirk Kelly, the interim school superintendent for Hamilton County, said at least five students had been killed. “Even though 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 10. “I couldn’t believe it. You know how you try to hold onto hope?”
“We are heartbroken for all of our students and their families,” Dr. Kelly said at a news conference around dawn on Tuesday. “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.” 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 girls and a boy had died, and that another 12 were still hospitalized. Six of the children were in intensive care.
Dr. Kelly said three of the students who were killed had been in the fourth grade; the other children who died had been in kindergarten and first grade. 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.
“They will always be with us throughout our lives,” Dr. Kelly said. “This is something that we will never forget here as a community.” “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.”
The superintendent also said 12 students were hospitalized on Tuesday, including six who were in intensive care. Three of the students who died were in the fourth grade. The other children who were killed were in kindergarten and first grade, Dr. Kelly said, but he did not identify the students.
Woodmore was open on Tuesday, the last day before the Thanksgiving break, and officials said counselors would be available to students and employees. “They will always be with us throughout our lives,” he said. “This is something that we will never forget here as a community.”
In addition to vehicular homicide, Mr. Walker, who was arrested on Monday night, was charged with reckless endangerment and reckless driving. Chattanooga’s police chief, Fred Fletcher, said a grand jury could bring additional charges. Dr. Kelly said that Mr. Walker worked for the school system’s bus service contractor. The bus was removed 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 small memorial of stuffed animals and flowers took shape, and investigators reviewed the crash site.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the accident. 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 30 m.p.h.”
Student fatalities aboard school buses are rare in the United States, where an estimated 25 million children use them daily. In a May report that examined crash data from 2005 to 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said 53 school-age children had died in accidents while they were riding in what the government classified as “school transportation vehicles.” 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.
District employees worked overnight at Woodmore, a small school that was crowded with chaplains and reporters on Tuesday morning, to prepare for a day of mourning. One woman, schools officials said, went to a nearby store after the accident and bought every stuffed animal in stock, about 50. She told employees at Woodmore, where an orange crate of plush animals waited in the school office after nightfall on Monday, that she planned to return with an animal for every student by day’s end on Tuesday. 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 accident happened as Chattanooga, a city of about 177,000 near Tennessee’s border with Georgia, continued to grapple with the aftermath of a July 2015 terrorist attack, when a gunman opened fire at military facilities and killed five servicemen. 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 respond 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 showed that his license was suspended briefly in 2014 for an insurance violation.
No one answered the door at Mr. Walker’s apartment on Tuesday morning, when a woman who said she was a co-worker tried 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 10 “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 346 accidents in two years, but the statistics did not distinguish whether the company’s employees were to blame for the wrecks. And although 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 respond 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 rare in the United States, where an estimated 25 million children use them daily. In a May report that examined crash data between 2005 and 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that 53 school-age children had died in accidents while they were riding in what the government classified as “school transportation vehicles.”
Emotions were raw outside Woodmore on Tuesday, 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 100 of Woodmore’s approximately 315 students were in their classrooms on Tuesday.
The crash occurred about 16 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 comfort to a mother or a father.”“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 comfort to a mother or a father.”
Dr. Kelly sounded a similar note when he spoke on Tuesday about the process of notifying the families of students who were killed.
“It’s the toughest thing that you will ever do in your life,” he said. “There are no words you can say.”