MOUNT OLIVE, N.J. — Investigators combed through evidence Friday seeking answers to why a school bus carrying 45 fifth-graders and teachers on a field trip collided with a dump truck on a New Jersey highway, killing a student and teacher and sending dozens to area hospitals.
The husband of teacher Jennifer Williamson-Kennedy said in a statement he was “in shock, devastated and totally crushed” by her death.
Police declined to release details about how the crash happened, but it occurred on a stretch of highway just past the exit for Waterloo Village, where the group from East Brook Middle School in Paramus was headed. The bus wound up on a guardrail close to a spot for emergency vehicles to make a U-Turn on the highway. A sign there reads “No Turns.”
Officials said Friday that most of the 43 injured people from the bus were discharged from hospitals, but they declined to provide details about the types and severity of the injuries they suffered. Officials also didn’t detail what injuries the truck driver suffered.
Schools were open Friday, with crisis counselors on hand to help students and staff. But evening activities were canceled, and standardized testing was canceled for Friday and next Monday.
Williamson-Kennedy’s husband, Kevin Kennedy, said in a statement released late Thursday to News 12 New Jersey that “my beautiful bride and I have been in total love every day of our lives since the day our eyes met on May 5th, 1994.”
Williamson-Kennedy was a social studies teacher at and had taught for about two decades, according to state payroll records.
The bus was one of three taking students from the school, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) west of New York City, to Waterloo Village, a historic site depicting a Lenape Indian community and once-thriving port about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the crash scene. The other buses made it to the site but returned to the school about 50 miles (80 kilometers) away.
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.
Fifth-grade student Theo Ancevski was sitting in the fourth row and was treated at a hospital for cuts and scrapes. He said he thought something hit the truck right before he heard a scraping sound and the bus “toppled over.”
“A lot of people were screaming and hanging from their seat belts,” he said.
There is no federal requirement for seat belts on full-sized school buses, but six states including New Jersey require them.
Paramus schools superintendent Michele Robinson said the district was canceling school trips for the rest of the year.
At a news conference Thursday, Gov. Phil Murphy said the truck driver was hospitalized, but officials didn’t reveal his condition.
The front end of the red dump truck was mangled in the wreck, which took place about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of New York. The truck was registered to Mendez Trucking, of Belleville, and had “In God We Trust” emblazoned on the back of it.
Cleanup crews loaded the wrecked bus onto a flat-bed truck Thursday night as they cleared the roadway.
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.
Mendez Trucking has about 40 drivers and trucks, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Its trucks had been in seven crashes, none fatal, during the last two years before Thursday’s crash, the FMCSA says. Messages left with the company weren’t returned.
A Mendez-owned dump truck driven by a driver police say had a suspended license struck and killed a French fashion stylist in New York in January 2011, according to court records.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 118 people on school buses were killed in crashes from 2007 to 2016, the last year for which data is available. Of those killed, 68 were passengers, including 58 school-age children, and 50 were drivers. School bus crashes killed 902 people in other vehicles over that span.
