SCHOOL BUS CRASH REPORTS 2004

Vienna girl killed when run over by school bus in Georgia
October 29, 2004

A 6-year-old girl was killed when she walked in front of her school bus and was run over.

Alexia Merrell, a kindergartner at Dooly County Elementary School, was run over by the bus around 3:30 p.m. Friday, just moments after she got out of the vehicle.
Several other students got off at the same stop and went to the right side of the road, but Alexia tried to cross the road in front of the bus, said Vienna Police Chief David Musselwhite. The girl apparently was standing in a blind spot of the bus driver when she was hit.

The front of the bus was equipped with a safety arm designed to keep children out of that blind spot, but police were unsure whether the child ducked under the device or ran back for some reason.

"When I got to the scene, she was lying in the road face down," Musselwhite said. "She was asking for her mother, but she wasn't crying."

Alexia was alive when she arrived at Crisp Regional Medical Center, but died before she could be airlifted to Macon, he added.

Musselwhite said Saturday that he planned to call in the Specialized Collision Reconstruction Team of the Georgia State Patrol to investigate how the accident happened. Police also wanted to question the students who witnessed the accident, but the children were too upset Friday, he said.

Bus driver Elija Simmons, 69, told authorities he didn't realize he hit the girl until he looked in his mirror and saw her lying in the road. No charges have been filed against Simmons.

The Associated Press - VIENNA, Ga.

NOTE FROM: Arthur L. Yeager, DMD, MMH
Sadly, this is the most typical of school bus fatalities. The profile of a very young child (K-3), run over by their own school bus, female, on the way home, is tragically the most common, fatal, school bus accident.

Very often this occurs after the driver has checked that the area around the bus, found that the children have cleared and then the driver must divert eyes to the road to prepare to pull out into traffic. At that moment the child drops something like a picture they have drawn being brought home to show to parents and the object falls into the path of the bus just as the driver pulls away from the curb.

Much attention is devoted to laws targeting passing the school bus and too little attention is paid to efforts to mitigate bus induced fatalities.

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