Deaths from New York tour bus crash at 14
www.reuters.com/news/us_________________________________________________________________________
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The death toll rose to 14 on Saturday after a tour bus carrying sleeping gamblers returning from a Connecticut casino flipped over in the Bronx, shearing off its roof.
New York • A crowded tour bus barreling for Manhattan overturned at high speed on a highway in the Bronx early Saturday and was sliced open by a sign stanchion. Fourteen people were killed and 19 were injured, five of them critically, police said.
Officials said the crash, which happened at about 5:30 a.m. on Interstate 95, was the worst loss of life in New York City since the crash of an American Airlines jet in Queens on Nov. 12, 2001, which killed all 260 on board and five people on the ground.
The victims were returning to Chinatown on a chartered bus from the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Conn. Some on board described grisly scenes of mayhem: at least one person decapitated, people hanging upside down, victims gashed by flying glass and screaming in the darkness, struggling to get out.
The driver, Ophadell Williams, 40, told police that his bus was clipped from behind by a passing tractor-trailer, which sped away.
The identities of the victims were not released.
The police quickly began a search for the driver of the tractor-trailer, but no description of the vehicle was immediately available. The police said at a briefing at the scene of the crash that it had not been determined whether the bus was actually hit by the unidentified tractor-trailer, or whether the bus driver, upon seeing it, began to swerve.
Investigators said the bus was operated by World Wide Tours, a company based in Brooklyn. There was no answer at the company’s telephone number on Saturday morning. World Wide Tours was recently flagged by federal regulators for troubles with fatigued drivers, although its overall safety record was satisfactory, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
The company’s buses were involved in two crashes in the past two years that resulted in passenger injuries, though details were not immediately available.
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