A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

distracted, and realized they were in trouble only as the bus took flight.
    Most of the survivors were doing well, but Charles Moreno, thirty-two, lost a leg and faced the loss of an arm. A private and shy man who was scrupulously honest even when he was having a rough time, he was a recovering alcoholic who was in his sixth year of sobriety when the accident occurred. A relative of Moreno’s recalled one of Moreno’s many good deeds. “One time, he found a blank money order, and we needed it, but he insisted on turning it into Safeway. It was for $160 and we fought over it, but he insisted . . .”
    As the Christmas season, 1998, was in full bloom, the groundswells from the bus crash continued to blunt the lives of those who’d been on the bus, those in the apartment house it hit, and even those who had participated in the rescue attempt. Many of the victims would be in the hospital until months into the New Year, and Metro was making arrangements to assist them with funds and counseling. The apartment dwellers had to find new lodging while the damage, estimated at about $200,000, was repaired. Beyond the monetary loss and the physical pain, the psychological cost was immeasurable. There were those who grieved and those who woke in the night full of fear. That would never really go away.
    And something else had risen its ugly head; one of the bus passengers had tested HIV positive. Now, the rescuers who had plunged into a literal sea of blood, some of them cutting themselves on the jagged edges of the torn bus, were warned that they should submit to tests that would show if they had contracted the deadly virus. And they couldn’t be sure for six months. It was a concept that most lay people who run to rescue their fellow human beings never think of; where there is blood now there is always danger.

    On December 8, fellow bus drivers, passengers, dignitaries and the Seattle public said good-bye to Mark McLaughlin, who had tried desperately to save his passengers by keeping his bus on the bridge. A procession of eighty buses drove slowly down Fourth Avenue toward the Key Arena, where five thousand people waited for a memorial service honoring both Mark McLaughlin and Herman Liebelt. Two Seattle police motorcycle officers led the procession and a tow truck pulled an empty bus emblazoned with McLaughlin’s badge number: 2106. His photo and his uniform jacket hung behind the driver’s seat, and thirty-two purple ribbons marked the seats where the surviving passengers had sat eleven days earlier. There were two black ribbons: one for McLaughlin and one for Liebelt.
    But there was no ribbon at all for Silas Cool.
    The buses rolled silently for an hour, blocking intersections, and seizing the street for that time in honor of the bus driver and the old man. No one minded. What had happened to them was something all drivers and many riders had feared. “We knew it was only a matter of time,” one driver said. “You never know who’s sitting next to you . . .”

    No one can really know what went on in Silas Garfield Cool’s head. He is not a villain in the traditional sense of the word because he was undoubtedly insane. He was a quiet boy who never quite fit in—who became a quiet man who didn’t fit in at all. His “bad back” was probably only an excuse for his inability to deal with the world. He had run as far as he could from his boyhood home, seeking a geographic solution to the thoughts that plagued him. But when he got to Seattle in 1979, Silas Cool found that he’d brought all his demons with him. He could not bring himself to admit that it was his mind that was so fragile that he could not work, but he could blame it on his painful spine. He may even have “felt” pain, and picked the term
scoliosis
to describe his ailment. He spent a tremendous amount of money on curealls, magnets, belts, and massagers but none of those could fix his mind, and so he still felt pain.
    Silas Cool was about twenty-four years old when he drove his Mustang to the Northwest. Already, according to his supervisors at work, he could not get along with his peers. Already, he was scornful of African-Americans and Asians, perhaps convinced in his own mind that they were a danger to him. The undiagnosed illness that eventually destroyed him had begun to grow like the faintest cuttings of ivy in his thought patterns. As the years passed, the “ivy” wound itself around and around his brain processes. Because he kept himself