School Bus

Widow Jennie Smith's four youngsters, aged 9 to 16, and 35 other Florida farm children were packed in their school bus when it reached the end of its outward route one morning last week. There one pupil's parent had built a special turnaround, so the bus would not have to cross the Atlantic Coast Line tracks on its way back to Crescent City's elementary school. But the morning was so foggy that D. R. Niles, the 65-year-old bus driver, kept to the road. He had just put the bus's front wheels on the railroad tracks when Death loomed out of the fog. The children were screaming and scrambling for the door when the locomotive struck.

The train, a freight, stopped 200 yd. beyond the crossing. Two bodies were on the cowcatcher. The rest were strewn along the tracks behind. Three of Widow Smith's children and three others were killed instantly. The fourth Smith child and three others died on the way to a hospital. All the rest were badly hurt.

To frantic parents the train's engineer gibbered that he had had his bell clanging, his whistle wide open, that he had not seen the bus until it had turned sharply almost under the locomotive wheels. Lying cut and bruised on a cot in a Baptist parsonage, old D. R. Niles hoped that he, too, would die.

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