Fatal Bus Crash in Atlanta

Mar. 2, 2007 — -- One of the surviving members of the Bluffton University baseball team recalled today how he saw "the road coming toward me" as the bus he and his teammates were riding in plummeted off of an Atlanta overpass in a predawn accident that killed six people and injured 29 others.

"I was one of the lucky ones. My collarbone was broken, I got some stitches in my ears and the corneas of both my eyes, my finger was ripped to the bone," said 18-year-old A.J. Rathman, a freshman at the Bluffton, Ohio, school, who was riding a chartered bus to his baseball team's annual spring training session.

Thirty-three people, including the coaching staff from the Mennonite-affiliated school 50 miles southeast of Toledo, were on the bus when it plunged off Interstate 75 in Atlanta and landed on a pickup truck traveling below, according to Atlanta police spokesman Joe Cobb.

Among those killed were the bus driver, his wife and four students; their names have yet to be released. The driver of the pickup truck was not injured.

The accident happened at around 6 a.m., when the majority of students were asleep, Rathman said. He woke up when the bus hit the wall of the overpass.

"I saw the road coming toward me," he said.

Rathman, who was seated on the left-hand side of the bus by the window -- the side that the bus landed on -- had a number of cuts all over his face from the shattered glass.

He said his older brother, Michael, was trapped underneath the bus and injured his hip. "He might not recover," Rathman said, sobbing.

He said the accident scene was orderly, with the team members helping each other.

One of the coaches helped him to get out of the bus. "He told me we had to get out, because there was gas everywhere," Rathman recalled.

A spokesman for the Atlanta Fire Department said 55 firefighters responded to the scene. It took an hour to extricate the players from the bus.

The students were being examined for broken bones and a few reportedly suffered head injuries and internal injuries, said Dr. Leon Haley of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. Grady Memorial took 19 of the injured, while others were sent to Piedmont Memorial Hospital and Atlanta Medical Center in Atlanta.

After he was treated, Rathman was released from Piedmont.