School Bus Driver, High on Coke, Busted by Camera

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.

But anger turned to outrage when Young's urine test conclusively found she had cocaine and marijuana in system. In fact, according to the prosecutor, she had taken cocaine shortly before getting on the bus.

Investigators later determined that Young, a mother of three, pregnant at the time of the crash, had been out all night getting tattoos, and that she likely hadn't slept. After a search of Young's house, investigators found cocaine on a bed-stand between her bed and her unborn baby's crib.

As investigators dug deeper into Young's background, they learned that there were prior complaints from parents about her driving. She even had a criminal record that included jail time. And the school knew about it, according to documents acquired by Crawford.

In June, after the videotape was shown in court as evidence during her trial, Young was sentenced to 22 years in prison. During the trial, students and parents expressed their outrage and Young offered an apology that hardly helped a community heal. Young, who has filed an appeal, is currently incarcerated at the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women in PeeWee Valley.

Several parents of injured students filed law suits. For example, Richard and Becky Clise, parents of Jake, the boy who lost an eye, and another injured student, Abby, have sued the Kentucky board of education, transportation director Dick Humphrey and Deputy Superintendent of Operations Kenneth Gray. The suit alleges that Gray and Humphrey received complaints about Young's driving prior to the crash and did nothing about it.

The surveillance video from inside the bus brings attention to another important and controversial issue. Why were none of the students wearing seat belts? It turns out that only six states in the nation require them in school buses, and Kentucky is not one of them.

Asked how she felt after seeing the video in court, Daisy Henson, the mother of injured student Amber Henson, said, "I was floored…I cried like a baby. And it gets me to think about it. My child was that close to being dead."

Added Amber, "I was mad. I mean… Why in the world would you go and do this, and then try to drive a school bus with kids… [the video] just brought back everything."