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had fallen, people were in shock. Those passengers who were somewhat mobile were trying to help others who whimpered in pain or who didn’t move at all. The bus seats were tumbled and bent, and the floor seemed to be gone. There was no way of knowing how many passengers might have fallen out of the bus as it came off the bridge, and no way of knowing how many might now be trapped beneath it.
    Patrol Officer Sjon Stevens wasn’t far behind the first patrol officers on the scene. Domestic Violence Detectives Monty Moss and Mike Magan happened to be driving nearby when a call for help came over the police radio. Not one of them could have possibly envisioned how serious the emergency was. Their first thoughts had been, “A driver’s been shot, he lost control of the bus, and it hit the curb, or a tree, or another car. . . .”
    But none of them expected to find that an entire articulated bus, half-full of passengers, had gone over the bridge and dropped straight down. And no one knew yet that the bus had actually clipped the three-story apartment house on the way down.
    Someone yelled that there were people on the roof who were injured. There weren’t
people
on the roof. There was only one, Mark McLaughlin. He had crashed through the windshield of his bus as it went over through the cement bridge rail, and he had landed on the apartment house roof. While Leighton ran to a nearby house to try to find a ladder, Officer Henry somehow managed to shinny up a drainpipe to the roof. He clambered his way to the driver of the bus and saw that he was terribly wounded with what looked like gunshot wounds to the upper right arm, chest, and abdomen.
    Suddenly, there were other policemen on the roof, too, and they helped David Henry pull the driver up and rolled him onto his right side so he wouldn’t drown in his own blood. The gunshot wounds were, at this point, unexplainable. Henry had responded to a bus accident, and now he found the man in the Metro uniform near death—and not just from the accident. As they worked frantically over the big man, they saw that his eyes had become fixed and dilated. Henry could no longer get a pulse, and he began CPR while another officer began forcing air into the bus driver’s lungs with an ambu-bag.
    Helicopters from Seattle’s television stations had already begun to circle the crash site, sending images of the disaster into homes across Washington State. The newscasters’ voices were low and worried. This was no ordinary news story.
    A helicopter moved in—too close. For ten seconds, the image of Mark McLaughlin appeared, showing emergency workers hunched over him as they desperately administered CPR to try to bring him back. The newsman back at the studio said urgently, “No, no—pull back. PULL BACK!” and the picture on the screen changed to a wider shot of the crippled bus.
    People watching at home knew they had intruded far too much into someone else’s life. Perhaps in someone else’s death. It was too early for any next of kin to be notified, and there was always the chance that someone who loved the injured man on the roof might be watching.
    David Henry yelled down for a fire department ladder truck to move in and bring a backboard up. If the driver was going to have any chance at all to live, Henry knew they had to get him to the hospital immediately. Carefully, they strapped the man whose name they didn’t even know yet to the backboard and lowered him off the roof.
    But it was too late. Despite all their efforts, Mark McLaughlin would be the first person in the bus crash to be declared dead.

    Seattle is known for its outstanding fire department, both for its pioneer Medic One program with highly trained paramedics and for its arson unit, Marshal Five. Now its paramedics were called upon to use their skill in “triage”; this wasn’t a test situation where “victims” are made up to look injured with fake blood, cuts and bruises. It was a real disaster that not one of