A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

destiny. He was doing the job he’d wanted to do for most of his life. He had only about five seconds with each patient, and he wanted to save as many victims of the bus crash as he possibly could. Like all Seattle Fire Department paramedics, he was conditioned to treat one or two patients at a time. He had almost three dozen in front of him. The name of the game was percentages, not individuals. It was agonizing for him to have to walk away from any patients that he might have saved had there been more time and more help.
    At Seattle’s prime emergency care hospital, Harborview Medical Center, the man who
was
Medic One and who had supervised the training of class after class of paramedics, kept in touch by radio. Dr. Mike Copass called the shots. It was he who would decide which patients would go to particular hospitals; no one could do a better job than Copass at assessing the capability of a hospital to treat so many injured. He talked to a medical command officer at the scene, and calmly gave hospital destinations. The worst trauma cases were loaded into ambulances headed for Harborview where they would be treated by crews who were adept at dealing with knifings, gunshot wounds, and accident victims. That was what they specialized in.
    Gradually, the rescue scene took on a kind of organized turmoil. MaGann’s tapes and ribbons marked those who needed help at once, and there were sixty-five rescuers, ten off-duty firefighters, five paramedic units, and twenty-seven aid vehicles on hand.
    It was impossible at this point to account for everyone who had been on the bus; they couldn’t even know how
many
people had been on the bus.
    Lacy Olsen had wandered across the street. The thirteen-year-old girl remembered that the boards of the bus floor had “come up, and I was under them. People were yelling and screaming and crying, and I guess I kind of pushed [the boards] out of my way. I looked around and saw that the bus was basically split in half and I jumped out a window. I couldn’t find Brandy. My eyes were blurry and I felt shaky, and I went across the street. There was a lady on the ground, and I was talking to her. Another lady came over—she lived around there—and she asked me if I was O.K. I said ‘I think so,’ but my ear was bleeding and my back was sore. It was hard for me to walk. I asked ‘My friend? My friend?’ and they said she was across the street. She was all cut up, and I just couldn’t stand to see that.”
    Sixteen-year-old Brandy Boling had suffered severe abdominal wounds, a lacerated liver and kidney, but she was conscious and lucid. When Byron Juliano, who was employed by the U.S. West phone company, came upon the scene, he asked her what he could do to help. She replied, “Call my father,” and she gave Juliano her dad’s cell phone number.
    Robert Boling answered his phone to hear a man’s voice attempting to be reassuring, “Your daughter was in a bus that just went off the Aurora Bridge,” Juliano said, “but she’s O.K. She was on the bus, but she’s O.K.”
    “She’s
where?”
Boling gasped. “She’s
what?”
    Both Brandy and Lacy would survive. They were taken to different hospitals and were both admitted in critical condition. Lacy had a severe back injury.

    Judy Laubach, who wished she had never decided to go to work that day, was admitted in very serious condition with a flailed chest, a fractured scapula, a ruptured left lung, and a broken back. Like everyone else on the bus who had survived, she was covered with cuts and scrapes. Still, she felt lucky.
    Francisco Carrasco had crawled out an emergency exit with his cousin Jose Navarrette, nineteen. They had wandered to another bus stop, waited, and then gotten on the Number 6 bus headed downtown. The two cousins went to a relative’s house, unaware that they were in deep shock. Only then were they taken to the hospital, where they were both admitted.
    Leanna Miller, who had tried to help others get out of the bus, was injured herself and was soon loaded into an ambulance. Her brother Shawn remembered, “I held on tight and I wasn’t thrown from my seat—but Leanna couldn’t hold on and she was thrown out of hers.”
    Laethan Wene, twenty-four, who had been on the way to a writers’ conference, had escaped with minor injuries. So had Jerome Barquet, whose hand and arm were painfully, but not critically, injured.
    Craig Ayers, thirty-seven, had severe abdominal wounds, Henry Luna had a fractured right