Friday, March 5, 2004 | 11:10 a.m.
A Clark County School District bus crashed through a wall on the side of Mountain Vista Street on Thursday afternoon after its driver fainted behind the wheel and veered off the road.
Four of the 38 students aboard the bus were transported to Sunrise Hospital with minor injuries, Clark County Fire Department spokesman Bob Leinbach said. The bus driver was taken to University Medical Center for minor injuries, Leinbach said.
The bus was less than one mile from the Vo-Tech High School campus, which it departed at 1:50 p.m., when it drifted to the right side of the road and crashed through a white fence with brick partitions before coming to a stop in the 5500 block of Mountain Vista at Rawhide Drive in southeast Las Vegas.
The bus driver said he had not been feeling well lately, according to Lleeann Love, director of the Clark County School District Transportation Department.
"He passed out," Love said.
The bus ran over a curb, motored along the sidewalk and crashed through several feet of the wall, including a number of brick partitions, before it came to a halt, Love said.
The wall separates Mountain Vista from the Sterling Court Apartments. The school bus stopped just feet from the apartment parking lot.
Pieces of the wall and brick partitions struck the front of the bus, shattering the windshield.
"He (the bus driver) is lucky to have been wearing his seat belt," Love said. "If he hadn't, he would have gone out of the window."
The parents of all 38 students were notified immediately and were allowed to personally pick up their children, Love said. A school bus was also provided to take the students home on their normal route.
Since August 2003 the Clark County School District has reported 188 accidents involving school buses, said Kimberly Harris, claims specialist at the District Risk Management Department.
Of those accidents, 114 were the result of bus driver error and 74 were unpreventable, she said.
The majority of school bus accidents result in only minor injuries, Harris said.
Two fatalities have occurred during the current academic year as a result of a district school bus accident, neither of which included bus passengers or school bus drivers.
An 80-year-old man was killed Oct. 10, when his car hit the back of a Clark County School District bus that was parked at the curb on Desert Inn Road near Boulder Highway, Metro Police said.
Jonathan Bilo of Las Vegas was heading east on Desert Inn in a 1990 Nissan pickup truck when he hit the back of the bus. The bus driver, Katherine Hernandez, 42, had finished her morning rounds and had pulled over to clean the bus, police said.
Bilo was taken to University Medical Center, where he died shortly after arriving. There were no students on the bus at the time of the collision.
A 48-year-old male motorcyclist was killed after a head-on collision with a district school bus in August.
The school bus, driven by 22-year-old Marvin Mosely, was carrying 45 children home from their first day of school when Mosely turned left from Pecos Road onto Owens Avenue, directly into the past of the oncoming motorcycle.
School district officials said it was Mosely's first day on the job.
Neither Mosely nor any of his passengers was hurt, but the 48-year-old male motorcyclist was pronounced dead at the scene after being thrown from his 2001 Harley-Davidson.
Mosely was taken off the job pending investigation.
The Clark County School District has 1,165 buses traveling nearly 1,000 routes, carrying more than 120,000 students each day, district officials said. District buses drove 50.3 million miles during the 2002-03 academic year.
During that year there were 261 accidents involving district buses, with 117 a result of bus driver error, according to Metro Police. Of those 261 accidents only 27 resulted in injuries reported at the scene, according to the district's risk management office.
In the past 10 years there have been four school bus accidents resulting in fatalities. Only one of those deaths was a student -- in 1997 a boy running across six lanes of traffic was struck by a school bus.
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