by Ann Rule
Seattle is known for its outstanding fire department, both for its pioneer Medic One program with highly trained paramedics and for its arson unit, Marshal Five. Now its paramedics were called upon to use their skill in “triage”; this wasn’t a test situation where “victims” are made up to look injured with fake blood, cuts and bruises. It was a real disaster that not one of them could have ever imagined. Triage is a French word that means to winnow out or to sort. It is an essential response to catastrophes where many, many people are badly injured. Most lay persons became familiar with the concept of triage after the horrific bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Rescue workers, physicians and paramedics are trained to quickly evaluate the conditions of those injured, to separate the living from the dead, the critically injured from those who can wait a bit for treatment. There were some beneath the Aurora bridge whom no amount of first aid would help, some who looked terrible, but who were only bruised and battered, and far too many who needed treatment immediately.
Seattle firefighter/paramedic Andre McGann faced an awesome task; his instinct and experience made him want to start helping the first person he saw, but his job that day was to separate the living from the dead, and the critical from the other injured.
Wearing a bright orange vest that read “TRIAGE,” McGann carried rolls of the thin colored ribbons like surveyors use, and a roll of adhesive tape as he went to work, marking human beings.
Was the patient breathing and did he have a steady, moderate pulse? Was his blood pressure within normal limits? Was he able to talk intelligibly?
McGann moved rapidly among the crash victims. Those in the worst shape got a red ribbon around the upper arm; they were to be transported by ambulance to a hospital ER at once. The walking wounded got green tags, and those who were in serious condition—but who could speak—got yellow ribbons. The dead got black ribbons. Later wrist bands would be put on with words that started with letters of the alphabet, followed by “Doe”: “Apple Doe,” “Blackberry Doe,” “Cadillac Doe . . .”
Carol Ostrom, a Seattle Times reporter, would ask Andre McGann later to relive those first minutes after he arrived at the unbelievable scene. The most difficult task was examining those injured who were not visibly breathing. McGann recalled grimly, “You give them one shot—tip their heads back.”
If he could detect one murmur of breath, he quickly slipped on a red ribbon. If they didn’t breathe at all, he tagged them black, and resolutely moved on to someone who might have a chance to live.
McGann, himself the survivor of a pedestrian–car accident when he was seven, had lived though twenty-seven fractures and critical internal injuries. Being a paramedic was his destiny. He was doing the job he’d wanted to do for most of his life. He had only about five seconds with each patient, and he wanted to save as many victims of the bus crash as he possibly could. Like all Seattle Fire Department paramedics, he was conditioned to treat one or two patients at a time. He had almost three dozen in front of him. The name of the game was percentages, not individuals. It was agonizing for him to have to walk away from any patients that he might have saved had there been more time and more help.
At Seattle’s prime emergency care hospital, Harborview Medical Center, the man who was Medic One and who had supervised the training of class after class of paramedics, kept in touch by radio. Dr. Mike Copass called the shots. It was he who would decide which patients would go to particular hospitals; no one could do a better job than Copass at assessing the capability of a hospital to treat so many injured. He talked to a medical command officer at the scene, and calmly gave hospital destinations. The worst trauma cases were loaded into ambulances headed for Harborview where they would be treated by crews who were adept at dealing with knifings, gunshot wounds, and accident victims. That was what they specialized in.
Gradually, the rescue scene took on a kind of organized turmoil. MaGann’s tapes and ribbons marked those who needed help at once, and there were sixty-five rescuers, ten off-duty firefighters, five paramedic units, and twenty-seven aid vehicles on hand.
It was impossible at this point to account for everyone who had been on the bus; they couldn’t even know how many people had been on the bus.
Lacy Olsen had wandered across the street. The thirteen-year-old girl remembered that the boards of the bus floor had “come up, and I was under them. People were yelling and screaming and crying, and I guess I kind of pushed [the boards] out of my way. I looked around and saw that the bus was basically split in half and I jumped out a window. I couldn’t find Brandy. My eyes were blurry and I felt shaky, and I went across the street. There was a lady on the ground, and I was talking to her. Another lady came over—she lived around there—and she asked me if I was O.K. I said ‘I think so,’ but my ear was bleeding and my back was sore. It was hard for me to walk. I asked ‘My friend? My friend?’ and they said she was across the street. She was all cut up, and I just couldn’t stand to see that.”
Sixteen-year-old Brandy Boling had suffered severe abdominal wounds, a lacerated liver and kidney, but she was conscious and lucid. When Byron Juliano, who was employed by the U.S. West phone company, came upon the scene, he asked her what he could do to help. She replied, “Call my father,” and she gave Juliano her dad’s cell phone number.
Robert Boling answered his phone to hear a man’s voice attempting to be reassuring, “Your daughter was in a bus that just went off the Aurora Bridge,” Juliano said, “but she’s O.K. She was on the bus, but she’s O.K.”
“She’s where?” Boling gasped. “She’s what?”
Both Brandy and Lacy would survive. They were taken to different hospitals and were both admitted in critical condition. Lacy had a severe back injury.
Judy Laubach, who wished she had never decided to go to work that day, was admitted in very serious condition with a flailed chest, a fractured scapula, a ruptured left lung, and a broken back. Like everyone else on the bus who had survived, she was covered with cuts and scrapes. Still, she felt lucky.
Francisco Carrasco had crawled out an emergency exit with his cousin Jose Navarrette, nineteen. They had wandered to another bus stop, waited, and then gotten on the Number 6 bus headed downtown. The two cousins went to a relative’s house, unaware that they were in deep shock. Only then were they taken to the hospital, where they were both admitted.
Leanna Miller, who had tried to help others get out of the bus, was injured herself and was soon loaded into an ambulance. Her brother Shawn remembered, “I held on tight and I wasn’t thrown from my seat—but Leanna couldn’t hold on and she was thrown out of hers.”
Laethan Wene, twenty-four, who had been on the way to a writers’ conference, had escaped with minor injuries. So had Jerome Barquet, whose hand and arm were painfully, but not critically, injured.
Craig Ayers, thirty-seven, had severe abdominal wounds, Henry Luna had a fractured right leg and head cuts, Regina King had right leg and rib injuries, William Holt, forty-two, had a fractured femur and chest injuries. Catherine Tortes, thirty-nine, had a fractured spine, a broken leg and pelvic fractures. Amy Carter, eighteen, had a fractured femur and a broken pelvis.
Their cries for help had mingled together, as had the blood that flowed from their wounds. Fourteen of the most seriously injured passengers were taken to Harborview Medical Center, including Jian Suie, forty-two, with left shoulder and back injuries, and Charles Moreno, thirty-two, with crushing injuries to his arm and leg. Herman Liebelt, who at sixty-nine had still loved to walk three miles around Green Lake and discuss philosophy, was grievously injured with back, head, and pelvic injuries.
It didn’t seem to matter where they had been sitting; their lives became dependent on chance the moment the bus they rode soared off the bridge. Those with young bones had done a little better than older riders, but all of them had come very close to death.
One of the first detectives arrived at fifteen minutes after three. Someone grabbed his arm and said, “My sister saw it! Some
guy shot the driver. He was a white guy, wearing a brown jacket!” And then more voices called to him to go to the front of the bus. It was Sasha Babic, David Leighton, Jim Dietz, and off-duty firefighter Dave Birmingham, who were struggling to help the people caught on the coach’s steps by the folding bus door that wouldn’t open. The old man with the white beard had his head caught in the door and he was unconscious. The young woman trapped there was conscious but said she could feel nothing below her waist. The men exerted all their strength and the door finally gave.
The rescuers asked the detective to check on a white male who was lying with the lower half of his body underneath the bus. This was the man who had been on the bottom of the pile-up near the folding front door.
The man, who wore a brown vest, was unconscious. The officer saw that he had an injury to his right temple area, although there was so much blood that it was difficult for him to see how bad it was. The man was quickly loaded into an ambulance and carried away. At Harborview Medical Center, the man was found to be in far too critical condition for anyone to ask his name. ER physicians working over him realized that, along with his other critical injuries he, too, had been shot. In the head.
Once the scene was being taken care of by professionals, David Leighton, the young Coastguardsman, and his Uncle Jim weren’t sure what to do. Leighton asked a police officer if he wanted a statement, but it was instantly clear there wasn’t time for that—yet. Nephew and uncle, they were covered with wet blood, and they had begun to tremble ever so slightly from the shock of it all. They walked back to Leighton’s red pickup and drove slowly away from the bus crash. Like so many others, they knew they probably wouldn’t sleep that night.
The Puget Sound Blood Center sent out a call for donors to help the thirty-three injured people who had gone down with the bus. “[The shortage] could be pretty serious by Saturday morning,” Candy Tretter, the manager of the Center said. “Types O and A, both positive and negative, are needed the most—as well as Type B positive.”
A thousand people showed up to donate blood.
There was so much to be done. The Seattle AIS (Accident Investigation Section) was already on the scene, and their preliminary analysis matched the statements gasped out by victims who could talk, and those of witnesses who lived beneath the bridge. They could see that the huge bus had been headed south as it came up the ramp onto the bridge and that it had suddenly swerved over the center line while it was still over dry land. It had clipped a small van. Incredibly, that van driver had survived without serious injury. Seconds later, the front of the bus had taken out the cement and iron bridge rails and, like an action scene from a Dirty Harry movie, it had catapulted off the bridge, taking part of the apartment house roof and porch with it.
The AIS detectives were amazed that the bus had landed on its ruined tires after dropping over 50 feet. It could have been upside down or twisted like a snake, and that would have been worse. They began their Total Station recreation of the accident. To do this, they would take all the measurements of the bus crash both on and below the bridge to a fraction of an inch. Like surveyors, they used tripods, optics—tools that must be perfectly still as they measured. With a reflector, they “shot” the scene with a beam that gave them accurate measurements. It would take them hours and hours, but they were patient and methodical. They would be able to recreate this scene at any time in the future.
Where there had been frenzy, there was now a degree of organization as the AIS investigators took control of the accident scene.
Sergeant Fred Jordan, supervising the Two-George Patrol Sector, was armed with a description of the man who had shot Mark McLaughlin when he drove to Harborview. Most of the eyewitnesses said he had worn dark clothing, and all of them said he was Caucasian, tall, and had dark hair. As Jordan entered the Emergency Room at Harborview, he was met by Security Officer Karen Jacobsen. She handed him a plastic bag holding a handgun. It was a small caliber, shiny, steel-colored Derringer five shot. There were also some unfired bullets in the bag.
Karen Jacobsen told Fred Jordan that the gun had been found hanging out of the right front pocket of one of the patients who had arrived from the bus crash scene, a man who looked to be about forty.
She escorted Jordan into an ER treatment room where she pointed out a tall, dark-haired man who lay naked on a gurney. He had a tube in his mouth, but all efforts to resuscitate him had ceased. He was dead. “That’s the man who had the Derringer,” she said.
The man’s clothing had been cut from his body so that he could be treated. Jordan took possession of the remnants of his clothing, and bagged them for evidence in brown paper sacks, carefully initialing the bags, and adding the date and time before he secured their tops. These would be turned over to the homicide detectives who would be investigating the bus crash. The dead man had a yellow band around his wrist with the temporary I.D. given him : the words “Whiskey Doe.”
Who was Whiskey Doe?
What had happened had happened. Even as the dead and wounded were carried off to hospitals and the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, the time had come to find out why such a catastrophe had taken place, and who was responsible. It was ten minutes to four in the afternoon when Seattle homicide detectives received the first word that a Metro bus had crashed near 36th North and Aurora. The word coming back from passengers who had been able to blurt out statements to police and paramedics was that their bus driver had been shot.
And now he was dead.
Assistant Chief Ed Joiner walked into the Homicide Unit and asked the detectives there to respond at once to the scene. Sergeant Ed Striedinger and Detectives Steve Kilburg and Rob Blanco left the downtown offices and headed north. The homicide detectives, whose job it was to investigate all suspicious deaths, raced to the crash site just beneath the north end of the Aurora Bridge.
The Aurora Bridge was a familiar place for them; it was the traditional site of suicides in Seattle, and had been for decades. The bridge was so high in midspan that death for jumpers, who were sick and tired of the world, was almost assured. A few people had survived a midspan plunge, but not many. Even more suicides had been accomplished by leaping off the ends of the bridge where the depressed jumpers had landed on boats and buildings. And, more optimistically, over the years police officers had arrived in time to save scores of would-be jumpers by talking them out of ending their lives.
The first phalanx of homicide detectives arrived at the bridge at two minutes after four. And there they saw a scene of such chaos that even they could barely believe what had happened. They watched as the last of the injured were carried off from the scene. Later that night, the bus would be lifted so searchers could check beneath it. If anyone had been walking outside the apartment house at the moment of impact, they might well have been crushed. The cluster of neighbors who had stood around the Fremont Troll talking and smoking were still pinching themselves with gratitude that they were alive.
As bad as the crash already was, the detectives knew it might get worse as reports came in from the hospitals where the injured were being examined.
But, as bad as it was or might become, it could have been a great deal worse. If Mark McLaughlin had been shot and then lost control of the bus only four or five seconds later, the double coach would have gone off the bridge over water that was a hundred feet deep. Instead of the injured landing in the front yard of an apartment house, they would have ridden the bus down and down and down to the bottom of the ship canal. Those who were unconscious and even those who might have managed to clamber out of the bus would surely have drowned. And then there would have been no statements about what had happened. No witnesses. No evidence. No survivors.
It was a terrible thought. Thirty-three people fighting for air under a hundred feet of murky water. The investigators wondered if that was what the shooter had planned all along, and if he had somehow misjudged the bus’s location on the bridge.
Detectives Steve O’Leary, John Nordlund, and Gene Ramirez
were paged to respond to the Homicide offices that Friday afternoon. Although many Seattle police officers and detectives would work to find out the reasons behind the shooting, the bulk of the investigation would be done by these three men. They were sent directly to Harborview Hospital, so they could begin to sort out the mystery of the crash of metro Number 359.
Among the three of them, they had almost fifty years of experience in solving homicides; still, they had never had a case quite like the one they faced now.
Each of them had come to Homicide through a circuitous route. Steve O’Leary had wanted to be a chef. Seattle’s grand old Olympic Hotel had the best chef’s training program in the area and he had applied there. “They said they didn’t have any openings, and asked me if I wanted to be a bellman. I said, ‘What’s that?’ ” But O’Leary needed a job because he was going to college, so he soon found out that bellmen carried thousands of pounds of luggage.
The Olympic’s bellmen shared an office with the hotel’s security officers, all of them off-duty cops. “I got to know a lot of these policemen,” O’Leary remembered. “I started scuba diving with them, and one of my cop friends said, ‘Why don’t you go down and take the test?’ ”
It sounded interesting to O’Leary. He passed with a high score, and was hired by the Seattle Police Department December 1, 1979. He never became a chef, but being a cop suited him. He walked a beat on the waterfront and in Chinatown for five years, worked with the Swat Team and Special Patrol, and then was assigned as a detective to the Sex Crimes Unit.
One of the things that tugged at O’Leary’s heart the most was seeing children so afraid of testifying against their abusers. He devised a way to give them a little bit of power. “I loaned them my badge while they were on the stand,” he said. “I pinned it underneath their clothes and no one could see it. But those kids knew it was there, and it seemed to give them some comfort.”