A crowded tour bus barreling for Manhattan overturned at high speed on a highway in the Bronx early Saturday and was sliced open by a sign stanchion. Fourteen people were killed and 18 were injured, five of them critically, authorities said.
The victims were returning to Chinatown on a chartered bus from the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Conn. Some on board
The driver, Ophadell Williams, 40, told police his bus was clipped by a passing tractor-trailer, which sped away. Out of control, the bus began swerving on Interstate 95, toppled on its right side and skidded for 100 yards along a guard rail in showers of sparks, then rammed into the support pole of a large sign.
The pole burst through the front window and sheared the bus in half laterally, from front to back, along the passenger window line, the police said.
Fire Capt. James Ellson described a sea of bodies, dead and alive, intertwined with one another in a hellish tangle of twisted metal.
"It was a pile of humans, either still in their seats or on the floor, wrapped in the metal," he said.
Survivors, too, told of horrendous scenes on board after the crash. One passenger, Jose Hernandez, saw a woman whose arm was missing. "We tried to help people, but there was twisted metal in the way," he said.
The dead were taken to morgues and the injured were taken by ambulances to hospitals in the Bronx. The identities of the victims were not released. At least 31 passengers were on board, ranging in age from their 20s to their 50s, officials said.
The police quickly began a search for the driver of the tractor-trailer. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said investigators had been given numbers from a license plate, but no further description of the vehicle was immediately available. Kelly said both the bus and the rig were moving at "a significant rate of speed."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This article appeared on page A - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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