School bus, truck collide, leaving 2 dead, scores hurt
New Jersey officials can’t pinpoint cause of Interstate 80 crash
MOUNT OLIVE, N.J. — A school bus taking children on a field trip to a historic site collided with a dump truck on Thursday, ripping the bus apart and killing a student and a teacher.
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.
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, said he heard a scraping sound and the bus “toppled over.”
“A lot of people were screaming and hanging from their seatbelts,” he said.
Gov. Phil Murphy said one adult and one student were killed.
Officials did not release their names, but a person who said she was the teacher’s cousin said the educator was Jennifer Williamson, who grew up in Paterson not far from the school where she taught fifth-grade social studies.
“She was really nice and so into teaching,” said Michelle Park, 16, a former student of Ms. Williamson’s who had gathered at the school Thursday evening near where people were dropping off flowers in a makeshift memorial.
Mr. Murphy said the truck driver was hospitalized, but officials didn’t reveal his condition.
The governor provided few details about the crash, saying, “There’s an awful lot that we just don’t know.”
He declined to answer questions about the circumstances that led to the collision or about the background of the dump truck’s driver or its ownership.
The front end of the red dump truck was mangled in the wreck, which took place about 50 miles west of New York.
The truck was registered to Mendez Trucking, of Belleville.
The bus had entered westbound Interstate 80 from southbound U.S. Highway 206, police said.
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 hospitalized, some in critical condition.
The bus was owned by the school district and had seatbelts, according to Paramus schools superintendent Michele Robinson.
There is no federal requirement for seatbelts on full-sized school buses, but six states including New Jersey require them.
The bus was one of three taking students from East Brook Middle School to Waterloo Village, a historic site depicting a Lenape Indian community and oncethriving port about 5 miles from the crash scene.
The other buses made it to the site but returned to the school about 50 miles away.
Some of the children were inside the bus and some were outside when first responders arrived, said Jeff Paul, director of the Morris County Office of Emergency Management.
“We had patients laying all over the median and on the interstate,” Mr. Paul said. “There were all kinds of injuries, every injury type you could expect in a crash of this magnitude.”
Thuy Nguyen, a nurse from Paramus, said she rushed to the school, where her son was taking a test after hearing the news.
“My heart just dropped. You hear the name of the school ...,” she said before trailing off.
Ms. Robinson said the district was canceling school trips for the rest of the year.