Cottonwood crash stirs images
Published Friday, February 22, 2008
Tuesday was one of those days I watched television news and shuddered.
Four students were killed in a school bus crash in southwestern Minnesota when the bus was hit by a van on Minnesota Highway 23 north of Cottonwood. The bus then collided with a pickup and tipped on its side.
The crash rocked Cottonwood, a small town of a little more than 1,000 people. At a press conference Tuesday night, Cottonwood Fire Chief Dale Louwagie was asked what the community could do. He simply replied, "Pray."
That advice hit home as if it were yesterday.
It was Oct. 16, 2005 that I stood at a similar press briefing at Chippewa Falls High School in Chippewa Falls, Wis. about 15 hours after a similar accident killed five people from my former community as the high school band returned from the state band competition earlier that morning.
I will never forget the phone call I received about 6 a.m. that Sunday morning.
My editor Ross Evavold said there had been a tragedy involving members of the school community and we were about to go into one of those rare modes that we in the newspaper business refer to as “All hands on deck.”
I was told to meet Ross at his home about 10 miles away and from there we were going to head out to an accident scene.
Here’s what we knew: There had been an accident involving a band bus and fatalities were reported.
It was our belief at the time that students had died in a crash. What we found to be true was very different.
The accident occurred shortly after 2 a.m. that morning on Interstate 94 in the vicinity of Osseo, Wis. I still remember the accident was at mile marker 94, putting it about 1 1/2 hours from the Minnesota border and about 25 miles east of Eau Claire.
The band had just won a surprising third-place finish at the state band meet in Whitewater, Wis. The band packed up about 11 p.m. Saturday and hit the road for home after band director Doug Greenhalgh gave a moving speech to his band about how they had just experienced a night in their lives that they would remember forever.
Three hours later those words would take on an eerily new meaning.
A semi-truck driven by Indiana truck driver Michael Kozlowski overturned and was spread out across the entire length of the highway.
About two minutes later a Chippewa Trails charter bus — one of four carrying band members back from the competition — slammed into the overturned semi at full speed killing bus driver Paul Rasmus, Greenhalgh, his wife Therese, their granddaughter Morgan and Branden Atherton, a student at the University of Wisconsin— Eau Claire who was working with the band as a student teacher.
In addition to those killed, 29 students suffered severe injuries and were transported to area hospitals after the crash.
That Sunday morning I was escorted to the crash scene by a trooper with the Wisconsin State Patrol. With a camera in hand, I shot hundreds of photos that will haunt me forever.
Most on the bus in the collision were taken to seven regional hospitals by ambulances and helicopters. My most vivid visual memory was coming up over the crest of a hill on the shut-down highway and seeing the flashing red lights of all those emergency vehicles flashing in the early morning as the sun was beginning to rise.
Believe it or not, working the crash scene was easy. That’s what good newspaper reporters do.
The five days that followed were the hard ones. I was involved in telling the story of the crash, the stories of the victims and their families, covering a memorial service that featured a 4 1/2 hour waiting line, and attending a handful of funerals took an emotional toll on myself and my newsroom team that we will hopefully never again experience.
We were emotionally tough when we had to be tough. We told compelling stories that I will forever be proud of.
People shared their stories. We listened.
The community publicly mourned. We stood like rocks and recorded it for history.
People cried. We only wished we could.
We toughed it out for five rough days, working a 70-plus hour work week before we simply suffered emotional breakdowns of our own.
The victims were friends. I knew the band director on a close basis through covering the education beat for years. His wife worked in the front office of the sheriff’s department and was a regular contact on the crime beat.
I was familiar with many of the 29 students injured in the crash through covering my community for nearly eight years.
The victims were the same age as two of my boys and many were considered their friends. My oldest boy’s girlfriend was on the bus and spent four hours standing on the roadside as emergency crews shifted through the carnage and triage experts did their best to account for all those on the bus.
The young girl who died in the crash was a sixth grader at the middle school — a classmate of my youngest son at the time.
This was more than a story for a newspaper reporter to cover.
Stories aren’t supposed to get that personal.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about Chippewa Falls, the band program, and a community brought closer together through tragedy.
I feel for the community of Cottonwood, Minn. and in some eerie way feel that I understand what they are going through.
Healing will be a long process. In Chippewa Falls it took 1 1/2 years for a homicide case against Kozlowski to go to court. The two-week trial in April 2007 brought to life a lot of old demons. When Kozlowski was acquitted, it tore the community apart. Lawsuits filed by those injured are just beginning to hit the courtrooms 2 1/2 years after the crash.
In Cottonwood a 23-year-old woman was arrested Thursday on vehicular homicide charges. It was the first step in a long, drawn-out legal process that will tear apart the Cottonwood community, too.
Time will never bring back the four young children killed in the crash or heal the emotional wounds of the surviving children on the bus that day.
But time will heal a grieving community — a community that can rest assured that brighter days are ahead because they were blessed to have 13-year-old Jesse Javens, 9-year-old Hunter Javens, 12-year-old Reed Stevens, and 9-year-old Emilee Olson among them — if even for just a short time.
My heart goes out Cottonwood and the victims of the bus crash. May God be watching over them all.
Jeff Hage is the managing editor of The Daily Journal.
Jeff Hage is the managing editor of The Daily Journal.