August 3, 2007
Stunned Victim Turns Hero
By ELLEN BARRY
MINNEAPOLIS, Aug. 2 — By the time they reached the Interstate 35W bridge, the children on the bus were waterlogged and serene, some still in their bathing suits, ready to go home. It was a rare moment of quiet, and as the bus crossed over the Mississippi River a few of the counselors, barely out of adolescence themselves, had dropped off to sleep in their seats.
What happened then is difficult to describe, even a day later. Angi Haney, a counselor, realized first that she was not in her seat, and then that she was not touching any part of the bus, and then that “we were just all flying in the air.” T.J. Mattson, a 12-year-old with wire-rimmed glasses, looked out a window and saw water on the other side. Dust filled the bus, blotting out its passengers.
And then they came to rest. Jeremy Hernandez, the whip-thin 20-year-old who works as the summer program’s gym coordinator, remembers time seemed to stop. Then something broke the spell, and his heart began pounding, and he jumped over two rows of seats and kicked open the back door. He remembers coolers flying, and he remembers passing along children to strangers lined up like a bucket brigade.
“I just acted,” Mr. Hernandez said Thursday. “I just moved. My feet were just moving. My body was following.”
The people gathered at the Waite House, the center in the Phillips neighborhood that sponsored the bus trip, were shocked, but their shock was mixed with joy. Of the 61 children and others in the school bus who plunged along with the bridge, only 14 required hospitalization, and 10 of those were quickly released. None died.
Instead, they returned to the center a day later — some with cuts and bruises, some unmarked — and swept one another up in hugs. “It’s one of those things,” said Anthony Wagner, president of Pillsbury United Communities, a nonprofit organization that operates the Waite House. “Five seconds, 10 seconds earlier, they would’ve been in the river. I think a miracle happened.”
Waite House is a low-slung brick building in Phillips, a south-side neighborhood whose population in 2000 was almost 12 percent American Indian, compared with 2.2 percent in the city as a whole. The area is also home to Hispanic immigrants and East African refugees; photographs in Waite House’s hallway show Cinco de Mayo celebrations, American Indian powwows and young girls in elaborate Hmong ceremonial dress.
Wooden houses with small yards line the streets, but children growing up in Phillips are hardly sheltered, said Kelly Morgan, who has lived there for several years. Forty percent of them live below the poverty line, according to census figures.
“You see everything you’d see on a New York street corner,” Ms. Morgan, 45, said.
For the 60 children who attend Waite House’s summer programs, a reward comes once a week: they pile into buses for a field trip like Wednesday’s, to a water park. On the trip back, they were singing a “really dorky” song in Spanish, about an elephant, said Monica Segura, 19, the center’s summer coordinator. The children remarked on the river as they passed over it, she remembered, and then the bridge dropped from under them.
Ms. Segura grabbed two children who were directly in front of her, but others fell on top of one another and started screaming. The front of the bus was wedged against a guardrail, blocking the doors. The silence was broken, she said, by Mr. Hernandez, who “jumped over the seats and kicked out the door.”
Mr. Hernandez sat beside her, looking self-conscious as she told the story. He was wearing a white tank top and low-slung jeans, and his first name was tattooed in elaborate letters on his left bicep. He had hoped to become an auto mechanic, he said, but dropped out of a training program at Christmastime because he could no longer afford the tuition.
In the moments after the bus came to a rest, the children “were all thinking they were going to die, and they wanted their parents,” Mr. Hernandez said. Once, when he was fishing in the Mississippi, he had plunged into the river to retrieve a pole, and the memory of the current rushed back to him in his seat at the back of the bus. “I’ve been in that river,” he said. “I don’t want to go out that way.”
Mr. Hernandez “woke everyone up,” said Ivan Luna, 15, who was sitting near him at the back of the bus. Kaliegh Swift, 10, nodded without a second’s thought when asked if Mr. Hernandez had saved her life. He was, she said, “the person who rounded everyone off the bus and helped everyone into the ambulance.”
Mr. Hernandez recalled the sensation that the bus was still moving and wondering how much time they had to evacuate. For what seemed like “forever,” he said, he was “grabbing kids and putting them out, grabbing kids and putting them out.” He barely slept Wednesday night for thinking, and his eyes were bloodshot. But he knew how he felt, he said. Lucky.
Not everyone at the Waite House felt lucky, though. James Hanson, a 21-year-old counselor, emerged with four broken teeth, livid bruises and a painfully bitten tongue — but no memory of falling, or of saving anyone, or of escaping from the bus.
“I’m pretty blank right now,” Mr. Hanson said. “I don’t feel a lot.”
Like many others, he had little sense of how catastrophic the plunge appeared to outsiders until long afterward. Restless at 3 a.m., he took a walk and glimpsed footage of the fallen bus on a television he saw through the window of a bar.
When he woke up this morning, he said, his roommate greeted him by saying, “Yep, you’re alive, you’re breathing.”
“I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess,’ ” Mr. Hanson said.
Amid all the embraces and congratulations, Ms. Haney wiped away tears of distress.
“I’m angry,” said Ms. Haney, 19, a University of Minnesota sophomore who wears a delicate gold stud in her nose. “How could a bridge we go over every day collapse? I’m mad that anyone had to die.”
But for much of the day, well-wishers were clustering around Mr. Hernandez.
Tyrone Mattson, whose five children were aboard the bus, waited at the center for several hours hoping to shake Mr. Hernandez’s hand in thanks, though by late afternoon he was unable to catch him alone. Mr. Hernandez answered questions from reporters politely for most of the day, though the look on his face was distant, as if he was still taking in what had happened.
His mother lives on the north side of the Mississippi, he said, and he is forced to cross bridges with great frequency.
“I’m going to invest in a map,” he said, “and try to go around them.”
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