Finding life after death 10 years after school bus crash killed four

Tanesha Hill was buried in her mother’s grave.

As a baby blue casket lowered into the ground, Tanesha’s mother Lisa felt the gravity of a new reality: her child was one of the four girls who died after a bus carrying 40 Lee High School students to the Center for Technology fell off Huntsville’s Interstate 565 overpass and nose-dived 30 feet on to an area near Church Street on Nov. 20, 2006.

The wreck sparked a debate about school bus safety. For the Hill family, and the families of the three other young women who died, it rearranged their worlds.

Tanesha, a senior, was buried in her cap and gown, but Hill wasn’t going to see her graduate or become the second-grade teacher she always wanted to be.

“She was the light of my life. When we buried her, I buried a piece of me, too,” Hill said.

She buried the part of herself that gave her a sense of relief during the chaotic times. As a mother of five who also took care of nieces and nephews, Hill worked two jobs to make sure the children had what they needed. To the younger children, Tanesha was the overseer, always making sure they did their chores and treated her mother with respect. To Hill, her daughter was her comforter.

“After a tiring, rough day I would be just sad,” Hill said. “I would just look over at her and she would say, ‘Mom, it’s going to get better. It’s going to get better than this.”

Those words continue to piece Hill together a decade after Tanesha’s death.

I’m about to die’

A sense of shock settled over the city the day of the bus crash. Citizens of Huntsville handled the disbelief in their own ways.

Lee students who weren’t in the wreck mourned together, allowing the boundaries between social circles to disintegrate. Teachers transformed into counselors as their students’ cries and screams echoed in the hallways. Parents who knew their sons or daughters weren’t on the bus called their children anyway just to hear their voices – because it could have been their child on that bus.

Friends of those who died tried to keep the four girls alive by telling stories. Nicole Ford, who was 19 when she died, was described as a fighter who learned how to speak and walk after she was shot in the face in 2002.

With spunk and wit, she continued her schooling after she gave birth to her son, DeMarcus, four years before she died.

Christine Collier, who was the youngest of the dead at 16, was a lover who helped the young and the old. Studying to be a beautician at the tech school, she also wanted others to love themselves as she weaved hair into beautiful braids and hairstyles.

Crystal McCrary, who died the day after the wreck at 17, projected a fun personality as she laughed and joked with both friends and strangers.

James “Rusty” Edward Moore Jr. could have been added to the roll call of the dead. He originally sat in the front that day. The portion of the bus that was smashed into the ground on impact and where the four girls were sitting. But a friend invited Moore to join them in the back to listen to music during the ride.

Moore’s account of what happened matches the details in the accident report released by the National Transportation Safety Board three years after the wreck. Sitting by the window, Moore said he saw a Toyota Celica try to pass the bus. The report said the driver of the Toyota, also a Lee student, lost control of the car and struck the right front tire of the bus. After hitting the 32-inch-high cement bridge rail, the report states the bus rode the top of the rail for 117 feet before the plunge.

The report doesn’t describe the weightless, roller-coaster-ride sensation the students felt as the bus tilted over. As Moore and other students tumbled down the aisle of the bus during the fall, he mentally prepared himself for the end.

“In my mind, I said, ‘I’m about to die,'” Moore said. “After the crash, all I smelled was gas. I’m thinking it’s about to blow up. So I just got up and ran out.”

Since he wasn’t critically injured, Moore navigated himself around the chaos of the crash. He got out of a bus filled with screaming and crying students to join a few classmates who limped around the scene trembling and dazed. Sirens from emergency response vehicles wailed around him. He found his then-girlfriend who was freezing and frightened. He laid her down, placed a blanket over her body and remained at her side: a moment captured in a photo that was shared across the nation.