the Carrollton bus crash

From Chris Kenning in the C-J with an account of the Carrollton bus crash 20 years ago today...

It's a good article on staggeringly depressing topic, but I thought the C-J would do something huge-- perhaps a "where are they now" on a lot of the survivors or some way of laying out the impact on those who died. But maybe it's all too gruesome...

Two good friends of mine have connections to the tragedy-- one whose cousin survived and one whose sister died. Brutal...


On May 14, 1988, after a day of riding roller coasters at Kings Island near Cincinnati, 63 chattering children and four chaperones packed into a church bus for a 9 p.m. trip back to Radcliff, Ky.

The children joked and laughed, surrounded by drink coolers, stuffed animals and balloons. After a stop to fill the bus's 60-gallon gas tank, 13-year-old Ciaran Foren dozed off on the drive through Interstate 71's darkened, forested hillsides.

At 10:55 p.m., just outside Carrollton, the bus's headlights illuminated an oncoming black pickup — a drunken driver going the wrong way. It smashed into the bus, puncturing the fuel tank and crushing its main door. The bus skidded to a halt, and in seconds the gasoline ignited.

As the fire spread to the bus seats, filling the interior with toxic fumes, passengers searched for the only remaining exit.

"All I heard was, `Get out! Get out! Get out!'" said Ciaran, whose last name is now Madden. "But there were too many people trying to get out the only exit."

Twenty-seven people were killed that night in what remains the worst drunken-driving accident in U.S. history.

Survivors and victims' families who will gather tonight for a vigil at a memorial near Radcliff say they are still haunted by the crash, bearing lifelong emotional and physical scars.

And while the crash prompted tougher drunken-driving laws and major improvements in bus safety in Kentucky and across the nation, the survivors say more needs to be done to curb drinking and driving.

"I hope bringing the story back out will wake up some people," said Madden, who now lives in Rineyville.

The collision

It was a promising May morning in Radcliff when the Rev. Don Tennison ushered children from Radcliff First Assembly of God church onto a bus for the youth group's annual Kings Island "Spring Fling" trip.

The group included many invited friends from the small town near Fort Knox. Tennison quieted the children for a prayer on the retired 1977 Meade County school bus that had served the church well.

Among the children was 10-year-old Patty Nunnallee, who had been invited by a friend. She was excited, never having been to the amusement park. Her mother, Karolyn Nunnallee, recalled how her concern about the trip was calmed when she learned how Patty would be traveling.

"I thought, `Well, what could be safer than a bus?'" she said.

The group made the 170-mile trip and spent the day riding The Beast and ascending to the top of a replica Eiffel Tower. On the drive home, the bus windows were shut — keeping children wet from water rides warm.

About 10:30 p.m., other drivers flashed their lights at a black pickup traveling north in the southbound lanes of I-71. Inside was Larry Mahoney, a factory worker from Owen County who was driving with a blood-alcohol level later determined to be .24 — more than twice the legal limit at the time.

Twenty-five minutes later, Mahoney's pickup crashed into the right-front side of the bus, sending its stunned occupants tumbling.

At first, it seemed they were OK. But then a fire broke out in the stairwell, right above the smashed gas tank. Driver John Pearman, who was fatally injured, yelled for children to get out. In seconds, youth pastor Chuck Kytta caught fire, falling to the floor near the front exit. He also died. The rear emergency exit, the only way out, quickly became jammed with bodies as the bus filled with black smoke. A cooler placed in the aisle near the back was also impeding traffic, and attempts to kick out windows failed.

Those who got out found traffic stopped in both directions, truckers jumping out to help, and survivors stumbling in a daze, said one of them, Allen Tennison, the pastor's son, who was interviewed from his new home in California.

Jason Booher, who was 13 at the time, recalled pulling others, many badly burned, through the back door. It was only minutes before the inferno grew too hot to rescue the ghostly figures barely visible inside.

Autopsy reports later showed that Patty Nunnallee was among the last to die, and witnesses reported that the last voice they heard was a little girl's, calling, "Mommy, help me," said Nunnallee, who believes it was her daughter.

"I can't think of any death worse than the way she died," she said.

The aftermath

On the night of May 14, Carroll County Coroner James Dunn was relaxing at home after a Saturday shopping trip, hoping his phone would stay quiet.

Shortly after 11 p.m., it rang. There was a highway accident, he was told. When he arrived, the scene was crowded with fire trucks and ambulances. Inside the bus was a ghastly sight.

"It was a nightmare. I couldn't believe what I was seeing," he said. "People were burned and dead."

At the same time, Radcliff parents were jumping into cars to rush to Carrollton, where Dunn set up a morgue in a National Guard armory. Families were sent to a nearby Holiday Inn to wait for updates.

Although some bodies were burned beyond recognition, "we were able to get dental records," Dunn said. "And we had people talking to families, to say what they were wearing."

The horror sank in slowly for some. Madden, fighting for her life after she was taken out of a coma that had been drug-induced because of severe burns, wasn't told of the death toll for a month.

The aftermath in Radcliff was grim. Church members found themselves going to one funeral after another. Booher went to 27 funerals, he said, sending him into a deep despair. Parents, including Nunnallee, felt numb.

"I can remember a couple of weeks after the crash, just sitting in my house, just terribly depressed, thinking, `How am I going to go on?'" she recalled.

Changes result

Although a drunken driver caused the accident, authorities found that the bus's lack of alternate exits and toxic smoke from the burning seat covers contributed to the death toll.

In 1977, the federal government began requiring all new school buses to enclose gas tanks in metal cages. But the church's bus had been built just before that.

The crash and resulting litigation, including a lawsuit Nunnallee and another family filed against Ford, the maker of the bus chassis, helped prompt several safety improvements.

Kentucky began requiring emergency push-out windows, flame-retardant seats, diesel engines, emergency roof hatches and side emergency doors.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration eventually added emergency exit requirements for school buses manufactured after September 1994. That included requiring more doors and a hold-open device on emergency doors.

Nunnallee went on to become the national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, pushing for stricter drunken-driving laws. Although the blood-alcohol limit was .10 in 1988, in 1991 Kentucky stopped allowing defendants to argue they weren't impaired at that level, then lowered the limit in 2000 to .08.

The state also stiffened penalties for repeat offenders, standardized training for officers and courts, increased the length of license suspensions for drunken-driving convictions and increased penalties for drunken drivers going the wrong way on a highway, said Capt. Tim Lucas of the Kentucky State Police.

MADD's goal was to cut the proportion of alcohol-related traffic deaths to less than 40 percent by 2000. Kentucky reached that in 1993. Last year Kentucky's rate reached 24 percent, second-best in the nation.

"It was a universal wake-up call ... but there are still far too many fatalities," said Angela Criswell, director of Kentucky's MADD, which is still pushing for stricter laws, such as requiring breath-testing ignition devices for first-time DUI offenders.

Driver lives in obscurity

Larry Mahoney, the pickup's driver that night 20 years ago, still lives in rural Owen County, not far from the site of the crash, near his parents' house on a remote road dotted with mobile homes and old barns.

Sentenced to 16 years in prison, he was released in 1999, his sentenced shortened because of good behavior. He married and has worked at a factory job at least part time while living in obscurity, according to those who know him.

He has never spoken publicly about the crash and has no plans to, according to friends and family.

"It's been 20 years," said Mahoney's mother, Mary, who answered the door at their home last week. "Just leave it alone."

Owen County Judge-Executive Billy O'Banion, who knows Mahoney, said he is a "model citizen" who seems to be accepted by residents.

"He's a man who understands the mistake he made and lives with it," he said. "He doesn't do anything to stand out. ... All he asks for is privacy."

Madden attended Mahoney's trial and remembered how little emotion he showed. Curious, she wrote him a letter telling him she forgave him. The two struck up a correspondence, and she visited him in prison.

"The more I learned, the more I knew he was just a man. He didn't wake up saying, `I'm going to drink a lot and plunge into this bus and kill 27 people,'" she said. "He was just a man that made a very bad decision."

Pain lingers

Tennison, now 35, said he still struggles with survivor's guilt. His seatmate that night was Madden, who was badly burned, while he escaped relatively unharmed.

"Could I have done something different before I got out?" he said he asked himself. "What if I had reached over here or there?"

Each year, his family celebrates Christmas with Lee Williams, a Radcliff First Assembly of God pastor who lost his wife and two daughters in the crash. After the crash, Williams married the widow of Pearman, the bus driver. Several pairs of survivors also eventually married, bonded by the trauma.

Booher, who lost his best friend, is now an assistant principal at Shelby Valley High School in Pikeville, Ky. He often speaks to students about the dangers of drinking and driving. He said he has kept a vow never to taste alcohol.

After a years-long journey of reconstructive surgeries, morphine and pain, Madden is married with children. And Nunnallee lives in Florida, still working with MADD and helping victims of drunken drivers.

Most families touched by the accident wish to put it behind them, she said, but the reality is, "it's never over."