A FEDEX TRUCK AND THE CHARTER BUS CARRYING ALMOST 50 PROSPECTIVE HUMBOLDT STATE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS BURST INTO FLAMES AFTER AN ACCIDENT ON I-5 APRIL 10 THAT KILLED 10 PEOPLE, INCLUDING BOTH DRIVERS, FIVE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS AND THREE ADULT CHAPERONES. PHOTO BY JEREMY LOCKETT/J. LOCKETT PHOTOGRAPHY
Responding to tragedy HSU pushed through grief to bring order to chaos after bus crash By Thadeus Greenson thad@northcoastjournal.com
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he high school students, nearly 100 of them, gathered before dawn on April 10 at Los Angeles’ Union Station. Arthur Arzola, the smiling 26-year-old admissions counselor who personally recruited most of the students to attend Humboldt State University’s two-day Spring Preview event, was there to greet them. Hailing from more than three dozen Southern California high schools, the students were split alphabetically into two groups and loaded onto a pair of buses chartered by HSU that made their way through downtown LA to Interstate 5, and started the slow trek north toward Arcata. The mood inside the second bus was full of nervous teenage energy, with some students introducing themselves and making small talk as others fiddled with their phones. One of the adult chaperones on the trip, a gregari-
ous, playful HSU alum named Michael Myvett, agreed to make the trip with his fiancé Mattison Haywood, who he’d met a few years earlier while both were studying at HSU. Students said Myvett worked the bus as it got on the road, walking the aisle, engaging students and making everyone feel comfortable. “Throughout the trip, he was coming to the back of the bus talking to everybody, making us laugh,” Daebreon Kendrick later told NBC News. The buses made a meal stop in Bakersfield and the students milled about. When it was time to get back on the road, some switched buses, wanting to sit near an old friend or make new ones. The second bus put on a movie. “(Awkward), we’re watching a movie on the bus and this full on sex scene started playing,” Banning High School’s 17-year-old Jonathan Gutierrez wrote on his Twitter
6 NORTH COAST JOURNAL • THURSDAY, APRIL 17, 2014 • northcoastjournal.com
page. About an hour later, Gutierrez fell asleep. At about 5:40 p.m., 100 miles north of Sacramento in the small town of Orland, Gutierrez was jarred awake. A FedEx big rig hauling two trailers was travelling south when, according to witness reports, it caught fire. With flames visible in the truck’s undercarriage, it swerved, clipping a Nissan Altima, before veering at a 10-degree angle, crossing the median and heading directly into oncoming traffic. Crash investigators later said they were unable to find any skid marks, indicating that Tim Evans, who was driving the semi, did not brake before impact. The truck and the bus collided head on, with flames and explosions quickly engulfing both vehicles. Jeremy Lockett was on his way from his Red Bluff home to practice with his rock band in Orland that afternoon when he came across the crash minutes
after it happened. “I pulled over and rolled down my window,” he said, “and as soon as I did, it was like driving by the sun. It was hot. It was raging.” Lockett said he would later think it was a miracle when he heard most in the bus made it out alive. In the days following the crash, the nation would become captivated with tales of heroism and survival, stories like those of Kendrick and 18-year-old Ismael Jimenez, who broke open windows and helped students off the bus as it filled with smoke and fire. Students fled across the freeway — dozens of them injured — and were transported by a fleet of ambulances to six hospitals from University of California Davis to Redding. Within minutes of the crash, word started trickling back to HSU that something terrible had happened. No one seems quite sure who was the first on campus to get word of the accident, but it was Interim Director of Housing Patty O’Rourke-Andrews who caught wind of it on social media and notified campus administrators, who were in the process of readying the campus for Spring Preview Plus, during which it would receive more than 500 high school students who had been admitted to the university. O’Rourke-Andrews called Vice President of Student Affairs Peg Blake, who happened to be having a postmeeting debriefing with Vice President of Administrative Affairs Joyce Lopes and Vice President of University Advancement Craig Wruck. Lopes said the three vice presidents huddled around a computer and started making some calls, checking with University Police dispatch and law enforcement in the Orland area. “We realized quickly it had been a quite serious accident,” Lopes said, adding that UPD dispatch started receiving floods of calls from worried parents and relatives within minutes of the crash. “Because of how fast the calls were coming in, we needed to come up with a solution.” The administrators decided to launch the campus’ emergency operations center and activate its emergency call tree. HSU President Rollin Richmond said he was probably sitting down to dinner — he can’t quite remember — when he got the call from Wruck telling him what had happened. Richmond said he hung up the phone and headed for the operations center. There, administrators decided on a course of action. They felt they needed to get some people on the ground near the crash site to meet with victims and their families, as well as to continued on next page