N.J. school bus wreck kills teacher, pupil

MOUNT OLIVE, N.J. — A school bus taking children on a field trip to a New Jersey historic site collided with a dump truck Thursday, ripping the bus apart and killing a teacher and student.

The crash left the bus lying on its side on the guardrail of Interstate 80 in Mount Olive, its undercarriage and front end sheared off and its steering wheel exposed. Some of the victims crawled out of the emergency exit in the back and an escape hatch on the roof. More than 40 people were taken to hospitals.

“I heard a scraping sound, and we toppled over the highway,” said fifth-grade student Theo Ancevski, who was sitting in the fourth row of the bus and was treated at a hospital for cuts and scrapes. “A lot of people were screaming and hanging from their seat belts.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said one adult and one student were killed. Their names had not been released. Murphy said the driver of the truck was alive at the hospital, but officials didn’t reveal his condition.

The front end of the red dump truck was mangled in the crash, which took place about 50 miles west of New York. The truck was registered to Mendez Trucking of Belleville, N.J., and had “In God We Trust” emblazoned on the back of it.

The bus had entered westbound Interstate 80 from southbound U.S. 206, police said. Cleanup crews loaded its wreckage onto a flat-bed truck Thursday night as they cleared the roadway.

Police didn’t release details of how the crash happened, but the trucking company had a string of crashes in recent years and a higher than average rate of violations that sidelined its vehicles, according to federal safety data.

There were 45 people, including 38 students, on the bus. Forty-three people from the bus and the truck driver were taken to three hospitals, where some were listed in critical condition.

The bus was owned by the school district and had seat belts, according to Paramus schools Superintendent Michele Robinson. There is no federal requirement for seat belts on full-sized school buses, but six states, including New Jersey, require them.

The bus was taking students from East Brook Middle School to Waterloo Village, a historic site depicting a Lenape Indian community and once-thriving port about 5 miles from the crash scene.

Some of the children were still inside the bus and some were outside when first responders arrived, according to Jeff Paul, director of the Morris County Office of Emergency Management.

“We had patients laying all over the median and on the interstate,” Paul said. “There were all kinds of injuries, every injury type you could expect in a crash of his magnitude.”

Paul said some of the first responders were “very emotionally upset. It was a rough scene to see.”

Zainab Qureshi, 11, said she was on one of the two buses not involved in the crash. She said those two buses made it to Waterloo Village, but the teachers were told about a half-hour later that they had to return to school because of bad weather.

Zainab said students on the other buses didn’t find out about the crash until they arrived back at school about 50 miles from the crash site and were reunited with their parents.

Thuy Nguyen, a nurse from Paramus, said that after hearing the news she rushed to the school where her son was taking a test.

“My heart just dropped, You hear the name of the school…” she said, trailing off.

Robinson said the district was canceling school trips for the rest of the year.

Mendez Trucking has about 40 drivers and trucks, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Its trucks have been in seven crashes in the past two years, none of them fatal before Thursday, according to the administration. A message left with the company wasn’t returned.

Mendez has an above-average vehicle out-of-service rate, which means inspectors found violations that had to be corrected before the vehicle could be returned to service. Mendez’s rate was 37.9 percent, according to the administration. The national average is 20.7.

Mendez trucks have racked up more than 130 violations in the past two years, according to the administration, including 27 for excessive weight, 17 for leaking, spilling or falling cargo, and four for speeding — three of them this year.

AP/The Daily Record/BOB KARP A school bus lies in pieces Thursday on Interstate 80 in Mount Olive, N.J., after it collided with a dump truck while taking children on a field trip. A teacher and a student were killed and more than 40 people were taken to hospitals.