NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – When Xaviel and Rosalee Lugo put their eighth grader Xelani on the bus to Jackson for a field trip, they were excited for her.
She and 23 of her classmates from Kenwood Middle School in Clarksville were on their way to the Greenpower USA Toyota Hub City Grand Prix where they were set to race the electric car they’d spent all year building from the ground up.
“We put a lot of effort into this,” Xelani said. “Not only has this experience built us as teammates, but also as individuals. It’s been a big learning experience.”
Xaviel and Rosalee wanted to see it, too, so they followed the school bus down Highway 70.
They were almost there when the bus, carrying 24 students, four teachers and the bus driver, crashed head-on into a TDOT dump truck and then a Chevy Trailblazer.
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“I had my head resting on the window,” Xelani said. “My eyes were closed. I opened my eyes and all I saw was us moving downward, it looked like out the window. And then the whole left side of the bus just crashed in and I saw people fly pretty much backwards. People that were sitting in the front rows ended up right in front of me. I was the fourth row from the back.”
From inside the bus, Xelani says it took a second for her to make sense of what had just happened.
“People were crying. It was loud. It was chaotic,” she said. “The people in the back just thought that this was just a minor crash. They were telling everybody, ‘Just be calm.’ They didn’t know how bad the front was, but I could see from where I was standing that people were slumped over. There was blood dripping on the floor.”
Xaviel and Rosalee, who were following right behind, saw everything.
“I didn’t initially see the dump truck that was coming, and then it’s just like, you heard the sound, and then you saw like a fireball kind of happen,” Xaviel said.
Both parents immediately jumped into action and started pulling kids out of the bus before they even knew if their own daughter was okay.
They say one of the teachers on board, Mr. Winn, was helping, too, even though he was injured. They say he refused to get off the bus himself until all the kids were out.
“He was bleeding and he couldn’t hardly see,” Xaviel said. “He said he couldn’t see very much, but he was like, ‘Get the kids, get the kids.’”
After the evacuation, Xelani says it was chaos.
“The whole front of my face was hurting,” she said. “The back of my head and the top of my head was hurting. There were sirens going off. There were people screaming and crying. There were people on the ground that weren’t moving.”
Xelani was airlifted to Vanderbilt Hospital along with several of her classmates.
She was diagnosed with a head injury and was released late Friday night.
But two of her classmates didn’t make it home. They were pronounced dead at the scene.
“I saw a lot of blood that was just dripping by and I couldn’t get in,” Xaviel said. “I wanted to get in because I know there was one more that I could kind of see, but I couldn’t get in, and that was one of the ones that we found out passed away.”
“We’re really sorry,” Rosalee said. ”We tried to get everyone out.”
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