Berea, Ohio, USA
1930 - Train Crashes Into School Bus; Nine Little Children, Driver Killed at Crossing. Three Others Are Injured Near Berea, Ohio; Two May Die; Bodies Hurled Along Tracks.
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Vehicle Demolished By Impact; Cries of Victims Add to Horror of Scene; Tragedy Fourth of Kind in State in Three Weeks.
CLEVELAND, Ohio, Jan 22. (A.P.) - The worst railroad crossing accident in Ohio in a year today killed nine small children and the driver of the bus in which they were riding, at Sheldon road, near Berea, Ohio, 15 miles from Cleveland. One other child was seriously injured.
Rushing toward Chicago, 45 miles and hour, a New York Central mail train struck the bus squarely in the middle. Wreckage and bodies were strewn along the tracks for 500 feet before the train could be stopped.
The bus driver had halted at the edge of the crossing and waited for a freight train to pass. A moment later he drove into the path of the mail train. There was a grinding of ripping metal and wood, and then the screams of dying and injured children. The identified dead:
DON TAYLOR, driver.
WILLIAM DAVIDSON, 10,
RITA ZELINSKI, 9,
VERNON DAVIDSON, 7,
EVELYN KALTENBACK, 7,
JACOB WALTERS, 12,
JUANITA WALTERS, his sister, 9,
DOROTHY ZEHNSKI, 11,
VINCENT ZEHNSKI, 6, brother and sister of RITA,
WILLIAM PASTORIK, 10.
The identified injured:
Ethel Davidson, 10, she has a chance to live.
Trucks and automobiles were commandeered and took the injured to Berea hospital and the dead to two morgues.
The scene of the accident was in a sparsely settled section, which, with a long, straight, level right of way, gives the trains a chance to make high speed.
Twenty-three children were said to have been in the bus, and it was possible that there were more dead and injured than were accounted for shortly after the crash.
Eight students at Berea high school had left the bus at their school just a few minutes before the vehicle was struck.
All of the children who were killed had been students in from the first to the sixth grades at the Brook Park school in a Cleveland suburb.
After the bodies of the dead and injured were picked up, the train crew, unable to do more, cleared the track of wreckage and resumed the trip. The train was number X-19, a mail run.
Apparently the bus driver did not see the train. He is said to have slowed, or stopped near the crossing, and then drove onto the tracks.
A moment later there was an awful crash, a grinding of ripping metal and wood, mingled with the screams of dying children. Cries of the suffering added to the horror of the scene for many minutes while rescuers gathered up the mangled bodies and started those who still were living to the hospital at Berea.
J. H. Beck, a section foreman, who was working on the tracks 1000 feet west of the crossing, said he saw the bus stop just before it was driven in the path of the rushing locomotive.
A moment later, he said, he saw wreckage flying into the air and bodies hurled right and left. They were scattered 500 feet down the tracks.
The Berea crossing crash was the fourth big bus tragedy in Ohio within three weeks.
Just 19 days ago, seven school children of Burbank, Ohio, were killed at Shreve, Ohio, near Wooster, when a school bus, returning from a basketball game at night, was struck there. Several others were killed and more than 40 have been injured in other accidents.
Pathos was added to today's tragedy when mothers and fathers of the dead and injured children began to arrive. Cries of anguish were heard as mothers found their loved ones dead or learned they had been taken to hospitals seriously injured. Many of the fathers also were unable to restrain their grief.
People of the surrounding section joined in the rescue work and the gathering together of the bodies.
According to Rudolph Ursprung, a conductor, a Berea, who was one of the first to arrive at the scene, a freight train was passing east over the crossing as the bus approached. It was believed Taylor waited for the freight train to pass and then drove his bus in front of the fast mail which the freight train probably had hidden.
Among the dead were three children all of one family. They were RITA ZELINSKI, 9, her brother, VINCENT, 6, and her sister DOROTHY, 11.
Hand, the engineer, said, "I didn't see the bus until we hit it."
Trainmaster A. H. Hancock of Elyria had an opportunity to question Engineer Hand when the train later arrived at Elyria. Hancock said Hand told him the fireman was putting in coal just before the crash and this prevented the fireman from seeing the bus.
Hand said the train was traveling 45 miles an hour. It consisted of one passenger coach and several mail and express cars.
It was exactly a year ago today that the tragic Bellevue, Ohio, bus accident occurred, in which 21 persons were killed when the bus in which they were riding was struck by an interurban trolley car.
Mrs. Rosie Davidson of Brookpark Village, was a witness of the accident, in which two of the children were her own. The were WILLIAM, 10, and VERNON, 7. She was about a quarter mile away when the crash occurred. Rushing to the crossing, she found the bodies of her children in the wreckage. Screaming in grief, she was taken home in a state of collapse.
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Jan. 22. (AP) - Gov. Cooper today directed John I. Clifton, state director of education, to set up immediately a program of safety for control of school buses as the result of the second major school bus accident of the month, in which 10 persons were killed today at Berea.
Fitchburg Sentinel
Fitchburg, Massachusetts
January 22, 1930
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