A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

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