A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

up and walking past me. He had on a blue, horizontally striped shirt, and he walked up past the people sitting in the front of the bus. I didn’t see the gun, but I heard two gunshots—BOOM! BOOM!—and I said to myself, ‘He just shot the bus driver!’ The bus went across the center lanes. I recall a couple of bumps and the bus came to a stop. I remember praying. I heard some gurgling—something—I don’t know if it was me or a body next to me or what. Then I remember sirens and a rescuer coming to help. I remember looking up at a rescuer and some glass was falling in my face, and I remember him telling me to look down so the glass wouldn’t get in my eyes. The next thing I remember I was in an ambulance, and the bumpy ride tothe hospital.”
    Judy Laubach wasn’t sure if she’d stayed inside the bus before it came to a stop, or if she’d been thrown out.
    P. K. Koo tried to find the words to describe what had happened. Koo, whose English was so spotty that he needed an interpreter, said he had had a clear view of the gunman. “He said nothing at all. The man didn’t do anything,” Koo recalled as he tried to explain that there had been no fight, no argument, no incident on the bus. “He just got up and went to the driver. I heard two shots. He was about forty, tall, slim—a good-looking man. He had a jacket on and some sunglasses.”
    Henry Luna had been reading the manual that had come with his cellular phone. He heard the “pop-pops,” followed by a second burst of sound. “People started yelling ‘Gun! Gun!’ I got down on my knees. I didn’t even know the bus had been in a wreck until some people pulled me out . . .”
    Francisco Carrasco didn’t see the shooting. “I was talking with someone when I heard what sounded like a backfire,” he said. “I remember the bus hitting something and I was thrown into the rear stairwell. I covered my head with my arms and grabbed hold of a bar, but when I looked, the whole right side of the bus was gone. If I would have been thrown another foot or two, I would have been gone, too. Diesel fuel was spilling all over me, soaking my clothes and head. I thought it was going to explode so I walked off the bus where the doors in the right side were missing. I remember the ground I got out on was asphalt. I walked across the street, dragging my left leg. There were people who tried to help.”
    When Regina King woke up, it was to screams and the sense that the bus had crashed against something. She heard no gunshots and no disturbances.
    Thirteen-year-old Lacy Olsen saw it happen. She heard the “pops,” and saw two bright flashes spit from the gun in the man’s hand, and then scarlet blood that erupted, staining Mark McLaughlin’s uniform shirt. Try as she might, she could not remember the man who’d held the gun in his hand. But she knew she had seen the gun, and the muzzle flash. “It happened really quick. I thought the man with the gun was sitting down.”
    Lacy couldn’t remember anyone shouting or any angry words. But after the gunshots, the bus took off like a roller coaster. First there was a big bump as it hit something on the bridge, and then there was an awful sense of free-fall as the bus left the bridge. Lacy didn’t know what was down below and she wasn’t even sure that they weren’t still bouncing in the air over the bridge itself.

    Bill Brimeyer had seen what happened. “I saw a white male wearing a black leather jacket, a fedora and dark sunglasses standing on the right side of the bus driver. I didn’t hear any argument or conversation. I just observed him shoot the bus driver—maybe two or three times. The bus swerved left. The last thing I remember is the bus falling. After the fall, I climbed out of the window and yelled for people to call nine-one-one.”
    And the bus
had
fallen, although some of the shocked passengers thought it had only struck something. The sixty-foot long, double-coached, twenty-ton bus had been a juggernaut without its driver at the wheel; it had careened into the concrete and steel bridge and crumbled it as it plowed through, and then, with its load of passengers, Number 359 had plunged over fifty feet.
    Leanna Miller had noticed the man with the sunglasses stand up and move toward the driver just as they started over the Aurora Bridge. “I heard two or three gunshots—it was a ‘popping’ sound, and the man looked like he was trying to take control of the steering wheel. The driver was