A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

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