TROUBLE ON THE BUS
Have you taken a bus lately? Most bus drivers are serious and safety-conscious. But we’ll let you decide whether the drivers in these stories belong behind the wheel of a 30,000-pound vehicle. (And if you’re reading this book on a bus, you might want to turn the page. Now.)
BREAKDOWN
On March 1, 2019, a group of Northampton, Pennsylvania, middle- and high-schoolers boarded the bus for home. Students said the bus driver, 44-year-old Lori Ann Mankos, had been fun at first, but after just two weeks on the job, she’d gone from frazzled to furious. On that fateful Friday, she didn’t follow her route. She missed stops. She drove through potholes hard enough to bounce students out of their seats. When she took a right-hand turn too fast, the bus ended up halfway into the oncoming lane of traffic. The kids freaked. “Pull over!” they shouted. Mankos’s response: she gave her young riders “the finger” and told them to “go f***” themselves.” But then she did pull over—into a Sunoco gas station, where she tossed the keys to the station attendant and hit the road on foot. Like the students she abandoned, Mankos had to call her parents for a ride. “I can’t take it anymore!” she wailed. Mankos’s mom believes her daughter had a nervous breakdown caused by the kids’ bad behavior. Stephen Scholler—father of one of the passengers—has some advice for future drivers: “If the kids are giving you a hard time, you don’t just abandon them. You’re the adult. You call for another bus and wait there until that bus arrives.”
MUTINY ON THE GREYHOUND
Even the best drivers veer over the white line now and again, so when a Greyhound driver on a 20-hour haul from Phoenix to Dallas did it the first time, riders probably weren’t too concerned. Concern grew, however, as she did it again…and again…and again. “We politely asked her four times to pull over,” said passenger Jasmine McLellan. The driver seemed to be sleepy and started pinching her cheeks with tweezers to stay awake. “It was awful,” said McLellan. When the bus started leaning, one fed-up passenger went ballistic. He stood up and clapped his hands over the driver’s head while shouting, “You should have stopped it when you were swerving!” Other passengers joined his cry for the driver to stop and call for a replacement. She wouldn’t. In fact, with the bus still moving, the driver stood up to argue. What finally stopped the peril? One of the passengers called Border Patrol agents. They “escorted” the bus off the road to wait for a fresh driver. In a statement about the terrifying trip, Greyhound said, “We take driver fatigue very seriously.” Let’s hope so. A government study credits “driver fatigue” in more than a third of passenger-bus crashes.
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In December 2018, a Washington, D.C., tour-bus driver managed to kill both Skagway, Alaska, mayor Monica Carlson and her 85-year-old mother in a pedestrian crosswalk on Pennsylvania Avenue. The mother–daughter pair were in town to visit the White House for Christmas and to visit Arlington National Cemetery, where Carlson’s son, a Marine who died in Afghanistan, is buried. Though the accident happened at 9:40 p.m., the crosswalk was well-lit. The driver, 45-year-old Gerard James of Baltimore, had passed required drug and alcohol screenings. He had a clean record and a valid commercial driver’s license. So what went wrong? Video from inside the bus showed James picking up his cell to take a call just as he was making the fatal turn. When he learned what caused the tragedy, Carlson’s brother-in-law, Steven Hites, said, “God almighty, that says it all.”
SAVED BY THE BANK
When Jason Rhodes, program director of the Above the Rim AAU basketball team in Gary, Indiana, received free tickets for a Chicago Bulls game, it must have seemed like a godsend. To get to the game, the team chartered a bus from the Jesus Saves Missionary Baptist Church. Kids, coaches, and chaperones had a blast at the game, and they hit the road home in high spirits. Apparently, their 82-year-old driver, Wilton B. Carr, did, too. As exhausted kids snoozed in their seats, Carr suddenly veered off the Indiana Toll Road and crashed through two barriers while traveling at 30–40 mph. The bus hit a gravel embankment; kids and coaches went flying. Rhodes believes that embankment was the team’s salvation. “Without it,” he said, “there might have been multiple fatalities.” Four players, ages 10 to 14, and a 49-year-old man had to be taken to area hospitals. As for the intoxicated octogenarian, Indiana State Police were not inclined toward forgiveness. Noting his watery eyes, slurred speech, and a strong odor of alcohol, officials charged Carr with five counts of driving while intoxicated and two counts of endangerment.
BLAME THE BIRD
On February 12, 2019, at around 7:30 a.m., a pigeon managed to fly aboard an M14 bus at 14th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City. After flapping around a bit, the bird headed for the windshield. The startled driver immediately ran the bus off the street, careening onto the sidewalk and crashing into the metal scaffolding around a construction site. Steel beams rained down, barely missing a pedestrian, but no one was injured. (Fortunately, there was only one passenger on the bus.) What was the pigeon doing? One observer probably hit the bird’s-eye, telling reporters, “He was probably cold and said, ‘Let me go inside. It’s raining.’ ”
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