A Staten Island man faces charges in connection with a deadly charter bus crash. Ray Villeda reports.
What to Know
- At least two people died and dozens of passengers were hurt when a charter bus bound for New York flipped on a highway ramp in Virginia
- 57 people, including the driver, were on the bus, officials said; no other vehicles were involved in the accident
- The driver, a 40-year-old Staten Island man, has been charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter, state police say
One of the two people killed when a charter bus bound for New York flipped over on a Virginia highway ramp Tuesday has been identified as an 81-year-old woman from Queens.
Virginia State Police said Wednesday her name was Janetta Cumberbatch, and she lived in Jamaica. One other person, an adult male, also died in the crash. Authorities identified him as Su Feng Xu, 37, a Chinese national. Dozens more, including kids, were hurt.
Bus driver Yui Man Chow of Staten Island has been charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in the crash, Virginia State Police said Tuesday.
The Tao's Travel Inc. bus traveling from Florida to New York with 57 people aboard rolled when it ran off the left side of an Interstate 95 exit ramp in Prince George County about 5:22 a.m., state police said in a statement.
Images from the crash scene showed crews working around the overturned bus in foggy conditions. It wasn't immediately clear if weather was a factor in the crash, state police spokeswoman Sgt. Keeli Hill said. But officials said fog prevented rescuers from using a helicopter to transport victims.
Monique Berry, of Harlem, described the crash for news outlets at a reunion center for survivors.
"All I know, I went to close my eyes and we were moving too fast," she said. "It swerved like a roller coaster. We tumbled five or six times. It wasn't less than that."
As the bus overturned, Berry said, she remembers thinking "that was it" and when she came to, a man grabbed her and they crawled out a window. In the chaos after the crash, people were lying in the mud and screaming, she said.
Local
"I made it. I just want to get home," she said.
The bus departed from Orlando, Florida, and stopped in Rocky Mountain, North Carolina, to switch drivers, police said. It was headed to New York City when it crashed.
A representative of the Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is on scene and the National Transportation Safety Board has been notified, police said.
Online FMCSA records show that the Middleton, Massachusetts-based company with four vehicles and eight drivers logged 900,000 miles last year. Records show no crashes reported in the past two years but list five violations in that period, including speeding and defective or no emergency exit windows.
A man who answered the phone at Tao's Travel on Tuesday morning declined to comment.
