A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

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