School Bus Driver, High on Coke, Busted by Camera
Surveillance camera leads to 22-year sentence for driver after horrific crash.
Aug. 17, 2007 — -- On the morning of Jan. 17, 2007, middle school children in the tiny northern Kentucky town of Dry Ridge waved goodbye to their parents before boarding their school bus, as they did every school day. But this day would be far from normal.
As the bus made its way along winding country roads, the driver, Angelynna Young, 29, lost control. What happened next — six seconds of terror and the horrifying aftermath — was caught on a tiny video surveillance camera inside the bus. CLICK HERE FOR THE INCREDIBLE VIDEO.
"She got back up on the road and she turned the wheel, like 180 degrees and we went across the median," recalled injured student Paige Elliott, who spoke to ABC News.
Tyanna Workman, also injured on the bus, added, "I felt my body being jerked that way, so then I grabbed onto the seat and covered my head. Everybody was just screaming. We had glass in our hair, our shoes, everything."
The bus smashed into a utility pole. All 17 students aboard sustained injuries, but none worse than Cody Shively and Jake Clise. Shively was seated right near the pole's point of impact. The back of his skull was instantly fractured, part of it torn off. Clise's face was propelled through a window, glass severing his left eye and nose.
Shively and Clise would undergo multiple surgeries. Today, Shively suffers brain damage, while Clise is blind in one eye and has permanently lost any sense of taste and smell.
Angry parents demanded to know how this could have happened. Following the crash, Young told an investigator that she slipped on ice; later, she argued that the children were acting up, distracting her. But the tape told a different story. "If you watch the tape," prosecutor Jim Crawford told ABC News, "you will not see any of these children acting out in any way…. That's one of the most powerful pieces of evidence I have ever seen."
In fact, according to Crawford, the tape clearly demonstrates there were no misbehaving children, no braking, and also no evidence of ice on the road.
