Little Time For Terror, Say Survivors

After a week of November monsoons, much of Seattle ventured outdoors into a brief interlude of sunshine Friday afternoon.

Laethan Wene of Shoreline checked out the sun and decided to make a spontaneous journey to Seattle Center. He hoofed it down to Aurora Avenue and, at about 2:45 p.m., climbed aboard the Metro express Route 359 articulated bus that runs from the Snohomish County line to downtown.

As he flashed his bus pass, he recognized the driver, 44-year-old Mark McLaughlin, and asked about his holiday. He then strode through the accordionlike midsection and slumped into a single seat near the rear.

With McLaughlin at the wheel, the bus trundled on southward, stopping periodically for passengers amid the strip malls, motels and parking lots of Aurora Avenue North.

Regina King, 28, a theater employee, climbed aboard at North 130th Street, her arms loaded with packages - early Christmas shopping at a discount store. She found one of the few remaining single seats, sat down and dozed off.

Jennifer Lee, 16, a junior at Roosevelt High School, boarded at North 85th Street and took a seat in the midsection, bound for her afternoon job at a downtown retirement home.

None of them remembers where or when the large man with the tan jacket, tan cap and sunglasses boarded the bus - only that he sat in the front seat, across from the driver.

At Woodland Park, the bus took its normal detour off Aurora to pick up passengers along Stone Way North. At North 38th Street, McLaughlin wheeled the bus onto the southbound ramp and back onto Aurora.

What happened next was instantaneous and unthinkable - like a scene from a Clint Eastwood thriller.

Just past 3:10 p.m., according to passenger accounts, the man in the tan jacket pulled out a small revolver and shot McLaughlin. Witnesses report no warning, no argument, no exchange at all. Just the normal rumble of a diesel engine, and then, gunshots.

McLaughlin immediately lost control of the bus, which hurtled onto the bridge at perhaps 40 mph. The 60-foot-long, 40,000-pound bus careened across the center line and into the path of an oncoming van, smashing through a concrete and metal railing before plunging into thin air.

Fifty feet below, where North 36th Street tucks beneath the concrete bridge approach, Joell Parks and Louisa Peck were looking at the sixth and final house in their day of house hunting. One more house, and they would be off to Queen Anne for lattes with friends.

A few feet away, Dan Vallejo walked out the front door of his apartment at 903 1/2 N. 36th St., down the stairs and down the street to catch his own bus.

Kurt and Cat Malvana stood with their infant son near the window of their neighboring unit. They did not hear the sickening crash because they both are deaf. But Kurt Malvana was horrified to see the rear of a bus drop past the apartment window and, worse still, a person flying out a window.

To survivors, it all happened so fast that there was little time for terror.

Wene felt like he was on a roller coaster, with "glass flying all over the place."

"This can't be happening," Lee thought to herself. "I wasn't aware we were on the end of the bridge or in the middle. We swerved really deep and I was just trying to hold on to whatever I could grab on to. . . .

"The next thing I knew we landed, bounced on something . . . and then we were on the ground."

King woke from her nap, heard a thump and somebody yelling: "Oh, my God! We're going off. . . ."

She braced for the impact, expecting to die.

Concrete and steel scattered like shrapnel as the bus plunged about 50 feet onto the roof of the apartment building. McLaughlin, the driver, was thrown onto the roof.

The bus then bounced back, destroying the stairway that Vallejo had descended five minutes earlier, and landed, miraculously, on its wheels next to two stunted pine trees.

The precise location was fateful.

Had the shooting occurred five seconds earlier, the bus might have swerved into the concrete center-lane barrier that ends just before the bridge and perhaps avoided the big fall. Five seconds later, and it would have plunged more than 100 feet into Lake Union.

Down on North 36th Street, witnesses reported a deafening crash followed by an eerie silence, broken only by the weak moans of the victims. Wreckage and bodies were strewn about the grassy area beneath the bridge, just a few yards from the Fremont Troll, a popular sculpture beneath the bridge.

Louisa Peck recalled people "standing around like they had just seen a ghost."

Inside the contorted remains of the bus, King found herself wedged under a seat. She was bleeding but, remarkably, not seriously hurt. "Another passenger helped me out. I thought I had to get out before the bus blew up."

It would be hours before she thought of her purse and holiday packages, left behind at the accident scene.

Wene was surprised to find he had suffered only minor cuts.

He climbed out of the wreckage and started to head home, then turned back toward his fellow passengers.

Lee was briefly trapped in the bus but not seriously hurt. A bystander helped get her out and talked with her until the ambulances arrived.

"The screaming, moaning, crying for help, people who couldn't talk at all," she recalled. "Some were just mumbling."

Rescuers arrived almost immediately - first some fast-acting bystanders, followed quickly by professionals.

"We were not overwhelmed," said Seattle Deputy Fire Chief A.D. Vickery, who lives in the area and was at the scene within minutes.

The first call came into the Seattle Fire Department at 3:13 p.m. and the first rescue units arrived at the scene at 3:19 p.m. Within an hour and 15 minutes after the first call, the injured had been removed from the wreckage and taken to hospitals, the majority to Harborview Medical Center.

But the rescue effort began even before the first fire crews arrived. Within seconds after the bus had plunged to the ground, nearby residents rushed to help the injured.

"There was blood all over but people weren't afraid to help," said Sasha Babic, 33, who lives next door to the damaged apartment building. Babic was one of a handful of people who worked to pry open the front doors of the bus, where several injured passengers lay piled up in the stairwell. While Babic and others worked to open the door with their hands from the outside, terrified passengers were pushing from the inside. Eventually, the door was pried loose, and the victims were pulled out.

At the bottom of the pile was a large, white male with blood flowing from a head injury. Only later did the rescuers realize that the man fit the description of the suspect in the shooting, identified by a social-service worker as Steven Gary Coole.

Dave Birmingham, an off-duty firefighter headed downtown to shop with his wife and two daughters, witnessed the accident and stopped in time to help open the bus door. He helped rescue a passenger whose head was stuck in the undercarriage of the bus.

An aid unit from the Fremont fire station 10 blocks away arrived six minutes after the initial 911 call and set up a command post. At the height of the rescue effort, 65 rescuers, 10 off-duty firefighters, five medic units and 27 aid vehicles were at the scene.

By 4:12 p.m., barely an hour after the shooting, rescuers had 27 passengers assembled in a triage area.

Meanwhile, Harborview kicked into emergency-response mode, calling all 17 major hospitals in the region to assess their emergency capacity. Shortly after 4:30 p.m., the injured had been transported to seven hospitals.

By 4:45 p.m., Seattle police officially took over the scene and began their homicide investigation.

Within hours, however, witnesses, victims and others were questioning what caused the afternoon of terror. Metro drivers pointed to their vulnerability on the job.

But as details of the shooting and subsequent crash emerged, Friday's tragedy looked more and more like the kind of onetime lightning strike that would have been impossible to prevent.

"Who was this lunatic?" Jennifer Lee asked yesterday. "What was wrong with him? It makes me realize how crazy the world can be. . . .

"And that life is very precious."