A Rage to Kill (4 page)

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 responded 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.

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.