'Lots of chaos,' Brandeis student felt something wrong with bus before fatal crash
WALTHAM - "I have four staples in my head," said Cassidy Hanck, one of more than two dozen passengers who survived a Brandeis University shuttle bus crash Saturday.
The bus slammed into a tree about a mile from campus on a return trip from Boston. There are now flowers at the scene where Vanessa Mark, a 25-year-old undergrad was killed in the crash. She was on leave from the school, living in Waltham.
The shuttle, run by Joseph's Transportation, was still running on campus Monday.
On Saturday, Hanck remembers feeling like something was wrong with the bus, even before it happened. "The bus was very touchy, like the gas and the brake," she said. "No matter what the bus driver was doing, we were all kind of getting tossed around a little bit on the bus."
"For a second it just felt like we were going really fast, and then there was a sound that my friend said he thinks the bus driver made like a scream," said Hanck, explaining the driver had a choice to make.
"There's a railroad track up ahead and like stores and other students and stuff...he could have kept going that way, or he could like swerve off the road to try and stop the bus," she said. "We felt like we were going fast, and then we went up on the curb, and then into a few bushes, and then into a tree at full force...lots and lots of blood lots of chaos."
She wants to clear up one misunderstanding she's heard in some reports. She says the bus never rolled. It simply crashed. As for the shuttle bus driver who also went to the hospital, there have been no charges filed. Hanck hopes people don't rush to judgment. "I genuinely trusted him as a driver, and I think what he did is what I would have done in a situation like that," she said.