by Ann Rule
Judy Laubach wasn’t sure if she’d stayed inside the bus before it came to a stop, or if she’d been thrown out.
P. K. Koo tried to find the words to describe what had happened. Koo, whose English was so spotty that he needed an interpreter, said he had had a clear view of the gunman. “He said nothing at all. The man didn’t do anything,” Koo recalled as he tried to explain that there had been no fight, no argument, no incident on the bus. “He just got up and went to the driver. I heard two shots. He was about forty, tall, slim—a good-looking man. He had a jacket on and some sunglasses.”
Henry Luna had been reading the manual that had come with his cellular phone. He heard the “pop-pops,” followed by a second burst of sound. “People started yelling ‘Gun! Gun!’ I got down on my knees. I didn’t even know the bus had been in a wreck until some people pulled me out . . .”
Francisco Carrasco didn’t see the shooting. “I was talking with someone when I heard what sounded like a backfire,” he said. “I remember the bus hitting something and I was thrown into the rear stairwell. I covered my head with my arms and grabbed hold of a bar, but when I looked, the whole right side of the bus was gone. If I would have been thrown another foot or two, I would have been gone, too. Diesel fuel was spilling all over me, soaking my clothes and head. I thought it was going to explode so I walked off the bus where the doors in the right side were missing. I remember the ground I got out on was asphalt. I walked across the street, dragging my left leg. There were people who tried to help.”
When Regina King woke up, it was to screams and the sense that the bus had crashed against something. She heard no gunshots and no disturbances.
Thirteen-year-old Lacy Olsen saw it happen. She heard the “pops,” and saw two bright flashes spit from the gun in the man’s hand, and then scarlet blood that erupted, staining Mark McLaughlin’s uniform shirt. Try as she might, she could not remember the man who’d held the gun in his hand. But she knew she had seen the gun, and the muzzle flash. “It happened really quick. I thought the man with the gun was sitting down.”
Lacy couldn’t remember anyone shouting or any angry words. But after the gunshots, the bus took off like a roller coaster. First there was a big bump as it hit something on the bridge, and then there was an awful sense of free-fall as the bus left the bridge. Lacy didn’t know what was down below and she wasn’t even sure that they weren’t still bouncing in the air over the bridge itself.
Bill Brimeyer had seen what happened. “I saw a white male wearing a black leather jacket, a fedora and dark sunglasses standing on the right side of the bus driver. I didn’t hear any argument or conversation. I just observed him shoot the bus driver—maybe two or three times. The bus swerved left. The last thing I remember is the bus falling. After the fall, I climbed out of the window and yelled for people to call nine-one-one.”
And the bus had fallen, although some of the shocked passengers thought it had only struck something. The sixty-foot long, double-coached, twenty-ton bus had been a juggernaut without its driver at the wheel; it had careened into the concrete and steel bridge and crumbled it as it plowed through, and then, with its load of passengers, Number 359 had plunged over fifty feet.
Leanna Miller had noticed the man with the sunglasses stand up and move toward the driver just as they started over the Aurora Bridge. “I heard two or three gunshots—it was a ‘popping’ sound, and the man looked like he was trying to take control of the steering wheel. The driver was fighting with the man, and the bus swerved from the far right lane through the railing on the other side, and we went over. I ended up on the floor and everyone was on top of me, and the bus was all torn up. I tried to help people out of the bus.”
Jerome Barquet lived to tell about what he had seen, too. “At about the Aurora Bridge, I observed an unknown male dressed in dark clothing approach the driver as if he was going to ask him a question. I saw him shoot the driver in the back three times. I didn’t see the gun or the shooter’s face. The bus driver slumped over the steering wheel, and the suspect tried to grab the steering wheel. The bus veered left across the northbound lanes of Aurora Avenue North and ran off the east side of the bridge.”
Jeremy Hauglee heard a loud popping sound even while wearing earphones. “I thought it was a rock and then this other guy stood up to see what it was. Then I got down real fast because it was like gunshots. I had thoughts of dying, and then the next thing you know, the bus goes over the side. I remember being at the bottom of the bridge, hoping my body would move and be able to run. I’d heard the gunshots and I thought the dude still had the gun.”
Barbara Thomas heard “three pops like firecrackers. I looked up and saw a big guy, six-two and about two hundred forty pounds, wide shoulders. He was wearing a loose shirt with a blue and gray checked pattern. After three pops, the bus started to turn to the left and hit the railing. . . . It all happened in about thirty seconds.”
So many of the passengers remembered that everything had been normal, quiet, like every other day—until they saw the dark-haired man get up from his seat and walk over to Mark McLaughlin.
Brodie Kelly “saw a white man go forward and stand next to the driver. He was middle-aged with dark hair. He shot the driver two times. I saw the powder fly out from the gun. The bus then went off the side of the bridge. I heard people yelling to get off the bus. I crawled off the bus through an exit window. I left my Jansport pack on the bus—with about twenty CDs in it, a small purple notebook and a book, Kiss of the Spider-woman.”
Jennifer Lee, sixteen, heard two gunshots. She rode the bus down, fully conscious the whole time. She saw people hurt and bleeding all around her after the crash and followed the instructions of a man who helped her through an emergency exit on the right side.
Gary Warfield’s attention was snapped away from his textbook when he heard two pops. He looked up and didn’t see anyone near the driver, but realized to his horror that the bus was out of control and they were going through the guardrail. “I thought we were goners,” he would remember. “I never lost consciousness—I landed flat on my back under a seat.” He tried to move and managed to crawl to a seat and sit there until a firefighter found him.
All around him, people screamed and moaned. A few were staggering blindly toward where the right side of the bus had once been, but where now there was only a wall of daylight.
Below the north ramp to the Aurora Bridge, people ran from their apartments at the sound that seemed like a hundred garbage cans smashed together. Several of the residents who had been loitering next to the giant Troll beneath the bridge realized that they had escaped being crushed by just a few feet. Where there had been lawn and flower gardens, now there was, incredibly, a bus. They huddled next to the Troll as debris rained down from above.
Sasha Babic, who was once a diplomat in Yugoslavia, was sitting at his kitchen table when his wife called that she had seen a bus falling from the sky. He looked out the window and saw that it was true. A bus, all crumpled metal and gaping holes, rested on the front lawn of his building, its two sections angled like a boomerang. It was as if the hand of God Himself had set the bus down. Another six inches forward and the front of it would have sliced through the apartment house. Another foot or two backward and it would have crushed the people under the bridge.
It had come through the evergreen trees, wheels down.
Babic ran to put on some shoes and called to his wife that he was going to try to help.
It was so quiet. Eerily quiet, except for some groans of metal settling. Dust rose from the wreckage; the scene looked like something out of a war at the world’s end.
Kurt and Cat Malvana didn’t hear the crash. Both are profoundly deaf, but Kurt was looking out the window and had seen something that didn’t equate with what he knew to be true of the world; he saw the rear section of a bus dropping from somewhere up above. And then he was shocked to see a human being flying out a window of that bus.
Through it all, concrete, glass, metal, and
fir branches fell like a waterfall over the houses and the apartment complex where eighteen people lived. A tenant in a second-floor apartment had been getting ready to take a shower when he heard a tremendous crash. He ran into his living room to see that his front door was gone, ripped away with half of his porch. His goldfish still swam calmly in an aquarium only inches away from the gaping hole. Only a few minutes earlier, another tenant had walked out the door where the front of the bus now sat.
Bob Heller, whose apartment house was two buildings down from the crash site, was talking on the phone when he heard the sound of “a whole bunch of dumpsters crashing.
“I went outside to see what happened,” he said. “When I came down the alley, and around the corner, I saw the bus. I saw people crawling out of the side windows of the bus—it had just come to rest there. I turned around to someone behind me and yelled, ‘Call nine-one-one!’
“I went to the front of the bus because I could see people’s bodies still inside. The folding doors of the bus were so close to the apartment building and adjacent to a tree.”
Looking for some way to help, Heller scanned the accident site and saw a man who looked to be in his late thirties lying on his back. He wore a tan jacket, and Heller saw that he had blood on his forehead and was unconscious—if not dead. But he checked his pulse; there was a faint beat. Heller moved on to help people who were still trapped inside the bus. He found a torn section of the accordion joining panel, and saw that many victims were still trapped under the floor panels which had been thrown around like giant plates. He helped the people pinned under them, and talked with others who were wandering around the wrecked bus, dazed. “I checked them for injuries, asked them their names, and then suggested that they just sit down until the paramedics could come and help them.”
It was close to 3:30 P.M. when David Leighton, a young Coastguardsman, was in his red pickup truck, driving his uncle, Jim Dietz, east along North 36th Street just where it ran beneath the Aurora Bridge. They came up a little incline and ran into what seemed to be fog. People were walking back and forth in the cloudy air. Leighton slowed down because of the congestion. And then they saw the still-quivering hulk of the battered bus in the yard of an apartment house. What they thought was fog was really concrete dust from the ravaged bridge rail. David said to his uncle, “My God, that just happened. We have to help.”
He pulled over and the two men leapt out. People had begun to pour out of their houses all up and down the block, the horrified looks on their faces mirroring Leighton’s and Dietz’s. There were no emergency vehicles, no police cars, not even the sound of a siren at this point. David called out, “I know CPR. How may I help?”
There was no response at all. It seemed that everyone still on board the savaged bus was dead. David Leighton moved quickly, checking people who lay on the ground outside the bus before he moved through the gaping hole where the right side of the coach had been. He was checking for pulses and for signs of breathing.
“The first person I came to was lying outside the bus and had severely broken legs,” he said. “He was unconscious, but someone was tending to him. I asked if he was breathing and he said, “Yes.”
Sasha Babic was there, too, trying to help. The front door of the bus was open, and two men lay tangled at the bottom of a pile of bodies on the bus steps. One appeared to be in his sixties and the other in his thirties. The younger man looked dead, but he made a choking sound as hands reached to free him. The older man’s head was jammed between the bus door and the frame. Babic and other bystanders used all their strength to free him.
A woman was caught inside the door too, and she was conscious. From deep inside, they heard a man’s voice soothing her, “It’s O.K., sweetheart. Everything will be O.K.”
One of the teenagers from the bus wandered over to a curb and sat down, his CD playing as if the world hadn’t just crashed around him.
In the distance, the forlorn keening of sirens began to sound. The first call to 911 had been clocked at 3:13 P.M. The first rescue units would arrive three minutes later.
For the moment, neighbors and passersby did what they could. Everyone on the bus wasn’t dead, although many of them were terribly injured. They had all plummeted five stories from the bridge overhead, without seat belts, bouncing around like BBs in a tin can, and yet almost miraculously, many of them were alive.
David Leighton and several of the people who had rushed to help smelled the pungent odor of diesel fuel. It had poured out of the bus’s tanks and saturated the ground and bushes, as well as many of the passengers. A spark or a lit cigarette could send the whole thing up in flames, and Leighton suggested that those not actively involved in the rescue effort move away from the bus.
He moved to the front of the bus and saw the man trapped on the bottom step; he was barely breathing and he was coughing up blood. The young Coastguardsman turned his head so he wouldn’t choke. “Then I and another man slowly picked up the three individuals on top of him—trying to keep their necks as straight as possible—and we put them on the ground. Then someone yelled there were more people inside the bus. I crawled through the front window. I came across an older gentleman who was in shock, and looking for his shoe. I told him to stay seated. I noticed another man, a thin, younger man lying on the floor of the bus with severely broken legs. He was barely breathing. Another volunteer said he would stay beside him until help arrived.”
Leighton climbed out of the bus and met the first police officer on the scene. He pointed out the three people whom he felt were the most seriously injured. Even a policeman, trained for disaster, was shocked by the horror he found; the bus was awash in blood, and so was the ground outside.
Seattle Patrol Officer David Henry had been in Patrol Unit 205, with a trainee aboard: Student Officer George Aben. He’d heard a radio broadcast that a Metro bus had driven off the Aurora Bridge. Disbelieving, he wheeled his patrol car around and headed there, arriving three minutes later. He grabbed his microphone and told Radio that there were “mass casualties,” with a large amount of diesel fuel on the ground. Using the public address system in his car, he cleared unnecessary civilian bystanders from the scene.
Throughout the neighborhood where the bus had fallen, people were in shock. Those passengers who were somewhat mobile were trying to help others who whimpered in pain or who didn’t move at all. The bus seats were tumbled and bent, and the floor seemed to be gone. There was no way of knowing how many passengers might have fallen out of the bus as it came off the bridge, and no way of knowing how many might now be trapped beneath it.
Patrol Officer Sjon Stevens wasn’t far behind the first patrol officers on the scene. Domestic Violence Detectives Monty Moss and Mike Magan happened to be driving nearby when a call for help came over the police radio. Not one of them could have possibly envisioned how serious the emergency was. Their first thoughts had been, “A driver’s been shot, he lost control of the bus, and it hit the curb, or a tree, or another car. . . .”
But none of them expected to find that an entire articulated bus, half-full of passengers, had gone over the bridge and dropped straight down. And no one knew yet that the bus had actually clipped the three-story apartment house on the way down.
Someone yelled that there were people on the roof who were injured. There weren’t people on the roof. There was only one, Mark McLaughlin. He had crashed through the windshield of his bus as it went over through the cement bridge rail, and he had landed on the apartment house roof. While Leighton ran to a nearby house to try to find a ladder, Officer Henry somehow managed to shinny up a drainpipe to the roof. He clambered his way to the driver of the bus and saw that he was terribly wounded with what looked like gunshot wounds to the upper right arm, chest, and abdomen.
Suddenly, there were other policemen on the roof, too, and they helped David Henry pull the driver up and rolled him onto his right side so he wouldn’t drown in his own blood. The gunshot wounds were, at this point, unexplainable. Henry had respond
ed to a bus accident, and now he found the man in the Metro uniform near death—and not just from the accident. As they worked frantically over the big man, they saw that his eyes had become fixed and dilated. Henry could no longer get a pulse, and he began CPR while another officer began forcing air into the bus driver’s lungs with an ambu-bag.
Helicopters from Seattle’s television stations had already begun to circle the crash site, sending images of the disaster into homes across Washington State. The newscasters’ voices were low and worried. This was no ordinary news story.
A helicopter moved in—too close. For ten seconds, the image of Mark McLaughlin appeared, showing emergency workers hunched over him as they desperately administered CPR to try to bring him back. The newsman back at the studio said urgently, “No, no—pull back. PULL BACK!” and the picture on the screen changed to a wider shot of the crippled bus.
People watching at home knew they had intruded far too much into someone else’s life. Perhaps in someone else’s death. It was too early for any next of kin to be notified, and there was always the chance that someone who loved the injured man on the roof might be watching.
David Henry yelled down for a fire department ladder truck to move in and bring a backboard up. If the driver was going to have any chance at all to live, Henry knew they had to get him to the hospital immediately. Carefully, they strapped the man whose name they didn’t even know yet to the backboard and lowered him off the roof.
But it was too late. Despite all their efforts, Mark McLaughlin would be the first person in the bus crash to be declared dead.