Driver thrown from packed charter bus in South MS blowout can hardly believe she’s alive
In a hospital far from home, Tina Wilson is still pulling pieces of glass and gravel from her hair.
She says she will never drive a bus again.
She does not remember the moments after a tire blew out on her charter bus this month, nearly tipping it and the 56 University of South Carolina students on board. She does not remember using all her strength to steer the bus back to standing, only to be thrown through the windshield and across Mississippi’s busy Interstate 10.
“I don’t question why this happened,” Wilson said from her hospital room in New Orleans, where she has stayed since the accident almost two weeks ago. “It’s just a joy every day that I open my eyes.”
No one died in the crash. Wilson has no brain or spinal cord injuries, but a helicopter rushed her to New Orleans, where is still healing from burns. She did not get run over. Every one of the students – members of the school’s Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity on the way to New Orleans for a formal – went home to their families. The bus did not hit a single car.
“It could have been so much worse and it wasn’t,” Tina’s sister Shirley said in a phone interview last week. “That’s just God.”
Still, with the blessing has come some frustration. Her sisters say they haven’t heard from either the university or the fraternity since the accident.
“The hero is laying in a hospital bed,” her sister Pamela said.
“Forgotten,” Shirley added.
Day after day, for more than two decades, the 55-year-old from Roebuck, South Carolina, has hauled cargo and people across the country’s highways. Her sisters said she takes wide turns even in passenger cars, never answers the phone on the road and can describe the details of any drive because she keeps trip logs in careful files. She drives her sisters, they said, only after she has adjusted her mirrors and checked to be sure everyone wears a seat belt. And whenever her day of trucking was done, she would always call her mother.
But she did not call that Friday. After she stopped the bus from flipping, it rolled down the interstate with no driver until a student who had been sitting behind her took the wheel and hit the brakes, authorities said.
A couple driving behind the bus nearly hit Wilson’s body on the road, but slammed to a stop and rushed to help her, her sisters said. They found her curled on the pavement, barely conscious and covered in glass, but alive.
“She did everything she could to save those lives, putting her own life at risk,” said Shirley. “Every day, I’m still in awe.”
“We didn’t know,” Pamela said, “if we were going to be planning a funeral.”
Now, her family is hopeful Tina will return home in a month. As she recovers, she has been surprised by a few wonderful moments, including a visit from the couple who helped save her on the interstate.
She has cried only twice in the hospital – once from the pain and once when she walked outside for the first time since the crash, she said. When her nurses ask how she feels each day, she tells them to circle the smiley face on her room’s whiteboard.
After nearly two weeks of lying in the hospital, Tina has decided one thing: she is done driving – for good. Even though she does not remember, she is afraid. She does not want to get on the road again and panic.
Her sisters are busy fighting for workers compensation and figuring out how to pay Tina’s rent. They have started a GoFund Me for donations. But they do not want Tina to worry about all that.
Her focus, she said, is to “be a blessing,” and to take her second shot at life to do something important. She is not sure what that might be.
“Wow,” she said. “I get to do this.”
She paused.
“Again. Still.”
