Battered yet thankful after ordeal, victims feel ‘we were born again’
PENSACOLA, Fla. — Christina Martin sat in the chair where she had slept at her only child’s bedside. It was a moment of calm for mother and daughter, both scraped and bruised. They had been together on the charter bus carrying the Channelview High School band from Disney World back to Houston Tuesday morning when it crashed and plummeted 50 feet to the bottom of an Alabama ravine.
It was hard to believe the nightmare they had endured not quite 30 hours before. They remembered the band director jumping behind the wheel of the bus to steer it away from oncoming traffic after the driver slumped over. The screams of the students now seemed surreal. The silence that fell after the bus landed with a thud still rang in their ears.
Martin, 48, a lab scientist who had been a chaperone on the trip, had emerged largely un-
scathed, except for a cut on her chin. Her 74-year-old mother, Otila Dominguez, also chaperoning, hadn’t been so lucky: she had broken her scapula and was over at the hospital’s Ronald McDonald House, where she had spent the night. The youngest of the family, Annalise, 18, lay curled on her side in the hospital bed — her tailbone bruised, a heating pad on her shoulder.
She was among five patients, including the band director, still under the care of Sacred Heart Hospital Wednesday morning after the Disney trip had ended so wrong. At least six others also remained hospitalized in Alabama.
Martin and her daughter believed the band director, Aaron Allison, had saved them with his heroics, grabbing the bus’s steering wheel after the driveer has slumped over. Allison was badly hurt in the crash.
Looking at her daughter, who plays the trumpet, Martin had thought about how lucky they were..
“That could have been our last moment,” she would later say. “But it wasn’t.”
“We’re a family”
There was a knock at the door. Greg Ollis, the Channelview ISD superintendent, came in with his wife, who is the high school’s former principal, and the assistant band director.
“We were trying to get here as soon as we could,” said Ollis. “Got here at midnight last night.”
The Martins were the first crash survivors Ollis had been able to visit. The students had departed last week, after school on Thursday, and driven through the night, arriving in Florida on Friday morning. They hit the ground running. Three days at Disney. A band competition. One day at Universal Studios Orlando.
Ollis had seen other students in their hotel on the morning after the crash, that morning , preparing to head home, as the Martins planned to do later Wednesday. He was filled with tearful joy when he saw that Annalise and her mom were alright.
“How are you?” he asked, standing at the end of the bed. “You doing O.K.?”
The room filled with energy. They exchanged war stories about their experience. Martin told the assistant band director, Alexa Thibodeaux, about how well she had slept in the chair. Thibodeaux had been on the second bus, which did not crash.Too wired to sleep long, she had spent the morning fielding messages and trying to look in on as many kids as possible.
Already, Thibodeaux had delayed her flight home twice.
“We’re a family,” Martin said, explaining how the kids in the band had grown up together. Their mothers knew each other, if not by name, then at least by face. They knew the band staff. “We’re blessed,” Ollis said. After Allison grabbed the wheel, Martin felt the bus jostle and swerved to the right, off the road. It careened toward the guard rail on I-10, above the steep ravine. Her stomach sank. She thought, “This can’t be happening.”
She heard the band director yell at the driver. She turned around and yelled at her daughter and the other kids. Wake up and hang on, she shouted.
She grabbed her mother’s hand and braced for the impact.
Another knock came at the door shortly After Ollis and Thibodeaux had left to visit Allison, everyone’s hero.
“I have a visitor,” a cheerful voice called. “Your grandma!”
A woman from Ronald McDonald House, Krystal Howell, pushed Dominguez in a wheelchair from the bright hallway into the darkened room.
“Hi, Nana!” Martin called to her mother, who still had on her pale pink Disney World zip-up. Her arm was in a sling.
Visitors had been coming and going all morning. Did they need help arranging flights back to Houston? (United Airlines was offering seats for victims and their families.)
Martin was touched by how nice and accommodating everyone had been, both in Florida and in Alabama.
She hadn’t been taken to Sacred Heart hospital at first, but to South Baldwin Regional Medical Center in Alabama. A nurse manager from Sacred Heart had driven her own car Tuesday night to pick up Martin and her mother and drive them to be with Annalise — a great act of kindness, Martin thought.
When they arrived at last, Annalise said, “It felt so good.”
They had many notes to compare: Martin had flown several rows forward in the crash. Kids had landed on top of her. She found it hard to breathe beneath the pile, and she thought she might die. Annalise, somehow, thought she had flown backward.
The mother sat now with her chin bandaged. A piece of it had been scraped off, but she didn’t notice it at the time, until a student mentioned the bandage. Neither she nor her daughter had felt anything when the crash occurred.
The bus had landed on its side, and one by one, the students had begun to slide out a window, letting people with head injuries out first, Annalise said. It began to smell like gas. Annalise worried the bus would explode.
“The kids were so good,” Martin said. “They got up and they started moving around. Some of them lost their minds, of course, and others helped them. They helped each other and they got out of the bus.”
The mother and grandmother stayed in the bus, along with the band director, a student and another chaperone. They were stuck inside. Students relayed back to Martin that her daughter was OK.
‘Mr. Harry gave his life’
Annalise had called while her mother was in the ambulance. A friend had found her grandmother’s phone. In its seethrough case was a list of students she was charged with chaperoning.
She had that phone now, scrolling through it on the bed in her band sweatshirt. Her mother had found her own phone too, miraculously. She’d grabbed all the wallets and cellphones she could, ignoring all the Harry Potter wands the kids had brought with them from Disney World.
Lunch arrived for Annalise: chicken, macaroni and cheese, green beans.
They had been born again, said Dominguez, Annalise’s grandmother. “Yeah, we were born again,” Martin said. “We went through all kinds of hell and eventually came out.”
Dominguez remembered the bus driver, Harry Caligone, who died in the accident: “And Mr. Harry gave his life up so that we could live” Dominguez said.
Annalise had been cleared to go after lunch when her blood test results came back normal. Martin, still sore, was having trouble lifting her arms. Another knock. The National Transportation Safety Board investigators had arrived.