A fatal field trip: Texas bus crash shattered victims' lives, revealed regulatory lapses

Editor’s note: This narrative reconstruction of a March 22 school bus crash in Bastrop County is based on more than two dozen interviews with survivors, parents, first responders and trucking industry experts along with reviews of multiple criminal court documents, lawsuits and regulatory records in the case.

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Jessica Flores awoke her young son about 7 a.m. March 22. By then, she had made breakfast and driven her husband, Christopher Reza, to work in time for his 6 a.m. start as a stonecutter. She also had prepared her son’s lunch: a ham sandwich, cookies, water, juice, diced apples and a mandarin.

Jessica dressed 5-year-old Mauro as he drifted in and out of sleep. She chose a white long-sleeved shirt, a Batman shirt and a black sweater. She formed a part and combed his hair to the right.

It was the first day Mauro was to be farther away than school. She felt a strong desire to keep him home. She called her husband.

“Oye, ¿y si no lo llevo?” she asked. Hey, what if I don’t take him?

“No, llévalo. Porque se va a divertir con los niños. Es una experiencia para él,” he said. No, take him. Because he’s going to have fun with the kids. It’ll be an experience for him.

Jessica hung up and went to her son’s bed.

“¿Quieres ir al zoológico?” she asked Mauro. Do you want to go to the zoo? She waited for him to say no. After all, her son was quiet and reserved.

Mauro nodded.

She resigned herself. She packed his bag, put him in the family's Mitsubishi Outlander and took him to school.

An hour later, Mauro climbed aboard a yellow school bus for a much-anticipated trip to the Capital of Texas Zoo, about 26 miles east of his elementary school. So too did Caleb Jimenez Martinez, a playful and sassy boy with tightly cut hair, and Mauro’s classmate, 5-year-old Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, who smiled underneath an oversized black baseball cap. They joined 41 other 4- and 5-year-old prekindergarten children and 12 adults, including the driver, as they rumbled down Texas 21, a highway dotted with seasonal bluebonnets springing to full bloom along a rural landscape.

Over two hours, students watched performances with otters and parrots, petted goats and other livestock, and heard the zookeepers list facts about the animals lounging in the shade. Then, they embarked on their return home.

But Hays school district Bus No. 1106 never made it back. Instead, it became the center of the deadliest school bus crash in Texas in nearly a decade. What happened on Texas 21 revealed a cycle of misconduct that enabled a history of substance abuse and a regulatory system that was unable to take a dangerous driver off the road.

By the evening, the bodies of a child on the trip and an adult traveling behind the group were covered in tarps on the side of the scenic highway. Dozens of other children and chaperones were rushed by ground and air to the hospital with broken bones, severe cuts and bruises — left with a lasting nightmare that replays in their minds.

Teacher Ana Laura Zapien Flores got to Tom Green Elementary School at 8 a.m.

The 560-student campus is nestled among subdivisions off Interstate 35 in Buda, 15 miles south of Austin. Almost 77% of the students are Hispanic, and 35% are English learners.

Of the 44 students on the field trip, half were from the school’s English language learner program.

Ana Laura, a 39-year-old mother of three, was excited. Her youngest daughter, Ivana Rodriguez, a pre-K student, would be taking her first field trip, first zoo trip and first school bus ride.

In the classroom, she and the other teachers labeled Ziploc bags with the pre-K students’ names for lunches and placed sweaters on the children’s desks. It was a crisp morning.

Ana Laura and her colleagues also laid out the children’s lime green or purple tie-dye field trip T-shirts with “Tom Green” written in cursive. An hour later, after students had trickled in, Ana Laura and the other teachers lined the students up to board the bus.

She smiled as she watched the children excitedly climb the four big steps onto Bus No. 1106 and take their seats. As she got on the bus, she realized it had no seat belts.

On the night of March 21, while the Tom Green students were getting put to bed, 42-year-old Jerry Hernandez puffed marijuana and fell asleep. He woke up three hours later, at 12:30 a.m., and did cocaine, he later told police.

With little sleep, he went to work an early morning shift for FJM Concrete Pumping, a small Bastrop County firm owned by Francisco Martinez that specialized in pouring concrete at construction sites. Hernandez had worked at FJM just over four months, as one of four drivers. On the job, he would unfurl a boom arm and use the truck’s machinery to pour the concrete mix throughout the site, manning the truck’s controls as fellow workers smoothed the concrete into wooden frames.

Hernandez had worked as a pump truck operator since he was a teen. He had grown up in the Rio Grande Valley city of Weslaco, later moving to Elgin, with a father who worked in construction. In high school, Hernandez had worked in construction, too, but had eventually wanted something different. He began to operate pump trucks.

Along the way, he married. He and his current wife are separated. In January, police arrested Hernandez on a family violence charge in Hays County for an August incident in which he allegedly tried to strangle a family member, according to an arrest affidavit.

Hernandez has had multiple vehicle-related infractions over 24 years. He paid fines on 10 different traffic violations from 2000 to 2012, including two $115 fines in 2006 for two charges from 2000 for an unrestrained child and for a seat belt violation, according to Bastrop County court records.

Most recently, Hernandez lived in rural Bastrop County off a highway, on a tree-shaded plot with three vinyl-sided homes. It was an intergenerational residence for the Hernandez family.

Over two decades, Hernandez worked for multiple concrete pumping companies in Central Texas.

But Hernandez struggled to maintain the clean slate demanded of the industry. In 2020, Hernandez failed a required test for controlled substances by refusing to take it, federal records show. He sought treatment. He tested positive for marijuana in December 2022 and sought treatment again. In April 2023, he tested positive for cocaine, but he never completed treatment, the records show.

Bus No. 1106 rumbled into the zoo’s parking lot around 11 a.m.

Zookeeper Michael Hicks greeted the group and gave out maps of the zoo campus.

He led the group up a hill, where the children gathered around a small stage and saw Kumo, the trained Asian small-clawed otter, perform tricks. The otter collapsed to the sound of “bang” as the children giggled.

The students stared at lions and bears, and they fed the Barbados sheep. They lined up to hold a boa constrictor on their shoulders. Caleb enjoyed holding the snake so much that his mother, Laura Martinez, bought him a green plushie at the end of the day. He, and later Ulises, grinned for photos as a zookeeper wrapped the snake around their shoulders.

Many of the children’s excited parents came along. Ana Laura’s daughter was thrilled to see a porcupine after reading a book in class.

The lone hiccup was when the zoo’s train stopped running after only one group of students had taken their turn.

At home, Jessica checked a WhatsApp chat as she cleaned around the house to see if Mauro was enjoying the zoo. She asked the mothers in the chat to send a photo.

Within minutes, a mother replied with two images. One showed Mauro by himself, now wearing the field trip tie-dye shirt. Another showed him with his classmates.

She laughed and was relieved. The morning’s nervousness left her.

By 1:15 p.m., the children had eaten lunch, and it was time to leave the zoo. Some wanted to ride home with their mothers, but the school had a policy that students leave from a field trip the same way they arrived.

On the trip back, most of the children were sleepy. The sun shone bright on Texas 21, and thin, white clouds hung on the sharp blue sky.

Ana Laura sat with Ivana and Mauro toward the middle of the bus on the passenger side. Ana Laura reminded the children to watch that their heads didn’t hit the bus windows. The bus bounced and bumped along.

Ana Laura texted pictures to her husband, Gerardo Rodriguez, of Ivana feeding animals at the zoo.

About 30 miles away, Hernandez woke up from a 15-minute nap in the cab of his truck, shortly after finishing his workday. He started the 2000 Mack concrete truck and headed east to return it to FJM’s lot.

Bus No. 1106 was less than 11 miles from the zoo, about halfway to Tom Green Elementary School, when it crossed the highway's intersection with Calder Road heading west just before 2 p.m.

Hernandez should have never been on the road.

A federal system is in place to prevent substance users from driving multi-ton commercial vehicles like concrete pump trucks.

In 2020, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration created the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, a centralized nationwide database for commercial drivers. It replaced a looser and more cumbersome system requiring carriers to call drivers’ past employers for their testing records.

If drivers fail a drug or alcohol test, they must receive addiction treatment and pass another substance test before driving again. An employer must check an employee’s clearinghouse record when they hire them and again annually. But Martinez, owner of FJM, didn’t check on Hernandez when he hired him in November, documents show.

In fact, Martinez neglected to complete the annual drug test on any of his drivers in 2023, though he had in at least some prior years, according to records.

In late March, Martinez also paid a $316 fine from a 2021 Texas Department of Public Safety citation for employing an unlicensed driver.

Even though Hernandez drove 11 months with a “prohibited” license, law enforcement never caught him, perhaps because of the limited points of contact between drivers and officers, but also because of holes in the enforcement process.

As of now, most officers do not have access to the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse from their patrol cars. If one had searched Hernandez’s name in the license databases they can access, his “prohibited” status would not have appeared. The DPS has begun to update its motor vehicle system to include the clearinghouse's information. Federal law mandates that it fully do so by Nov. 18.

A federal law published in 2021 seeks to tighten controls by requiring state agencies like the DPS to sync their systems with clearinghouse data and to automatically suspend the commercial licenses of drivers with “prohibited” status.

Had an officer or inspector noticed Hernandez’s license was “prohibited,” federal law would have required they place him out of service, which means removing him from behind the wheel.

In Texas, commercial vehicle inspectors are some of the few officials with quick access to the Clearinghouse. They are supposed to check truck drivers’ licenses through inspections at weigh stations or on-road inspections conducted during a patrol. However, the only two weigh stations in Central Texas are north of San Marcos on Interstate 35 and east of Seguin on Interstate 10. That means many drivers operating locally might never encounter an inspector.

Carriers who employ “prohibited” drivers are subject to fines or suspensions if they were caught via an audit, though the DPS focuses its audits on companies that have been involved in crashes, have low safety ratings or receive referrals from officers.

Jason Feltoon, an Austin attorney representing Ana Laura, said the current regulatory system relies on individual company compliance. Federal enforcement happens largely after a violation occurs.

The burden lies with operators like Martinez, though more monitoring could improve safety, Feltoon said.

“Once you get these trucks up to speed, they're extraordinarily dangerous,” Feltoon said. “Should there be more government oversight? Absolutely.”

On Texas 21, just before 2 p.m., Hernandez’s eastbound concrete pump truck began to veer into the lane of opposing traffic. The route had one westbound and two eastbound lanes and no divider between the two.

The school bus driver tried to evade Hernandez by jerking right into the road’s narrow shoulder.

It didn’t stop the crash. About three-quarters of the pump truck was already in the opposite lane. The truck rammed into the left side of the school bus’s cab and pushed its back end off the road. The bus flipped on its right side and skidded through the dirt and grass before rolling over and crashing to a stop on its wheels. Its back half sat on the grassy shoulder, leaning to the driver’s side.

Behind the bus, the pump truck barreled toward another car, which avoided it, and then collided with a gray Hyundai Tucson. It crushed that vehicle into the guardrail, killing its lone passenger, University of Texas graduate student Ryan Wallace, 33.

Inside the bus, Ana Laura felt nothing. She saw nothing except glass flying and children tossed. Sheets of paper flew out of the bus.

It wasn’t until the bus rolled to a stop that she began to look around.

Children screamed. A big cut ran down the side of Ivana’s face. Other children had cuts on their faces as well.

Ana Laura tried to tell the terrified children everything would be all right.

“Mama’s going to be here soon,” she said.

The window glass was cracked and bent on some panes, gone in others. The frames of many windows bowed outward. The bus’s front hood had popped open.

One of the teachers was lying in the middle of the bus aisle. Another knelt beside her and screamed, “Please don’t go. Stay with us.”

The teacher didn’t respond. Ana Laura later learned that, though the teacher was seriously injured, she survived.

In a white Toyota RAV4 driving behind the bus, 40-year-old Jason Mertz, a father of four children 1 to 16 years old, swerved to avoid the pump truck.

He’d been heading home from another day of installing medical equipment for a client in Bastrop, when the hulking truck roared toward him, rocking off balance from wheel to wheel.

Mertz came to a stop. He heard a crash behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the concrete truck plow through the guardrail.

Moments later, he joined other drivers and neighbors along the busy highway in becoming first responders. Mertz saw the front right corner of Bus No. 1106 was crunched inward above the stairs. At the back, someone stood inside the bus, picking children up and passing them down to another person.

As Mertz held the children in his arms as if they were his own, they cried. People were gathering the children on the south side of the bus where other adults tried to comfort them.

One of the children Mertz held was different — too still. He brought the child to the other side of the bus, away from the other students, and laid him on the tailgate of someone’s pickup, where an emergency responder — the first Mertz had seen — began to attend to him. Mertz did the only thing he could to provide the boy comfort: He used an extra work shirt from his car to create a pillow.

Mertz later learned the child’s name was Ulises. He was the only bus passenger killed.

Mertz watched as medics from three counties converged by ground and air in ambulances and choppers.

One of them was Jason Pack, a battalion chief from Travis County Emergency Services District No. 11.

He and his crew responded to the call to help in the neighboring county because of the number of victims.

Pack had only been at the scene for moments when he got a briefing from an incident commander who relayed the number of those seriously injured and those less hurt who still needed treatment.

Pack also learned that a boy on the bus and another driver were dead.

Through his 22 years in the profession, Pack, 49, has learned to push those realities out of his mind to focus on helping those he could.

Pack, the father of a 16-, a 10- and an 8-year-old, began tending to the young patients and loading them into ambulances.

He found a girl who had lost her shoes, and though she was not seriously hurt, he felt she still needed to go to a hospital. She told him she didn’t want to walk barefoot on the pavement.

“Climb aboard, here we go,” he told her. He lifted her off the ground toward an awaiting ambulance.

Caleb’s mother, Laura, had been chatting at a Bastrop friend’s house since leaving the zoo, when her neighbor called with news of the crash. She thought of Caleb, her youngest son.

She tried to calm herself. The large bus couldn't be too damaged. She got in her car.

Google Maps showed a crash widget on Texas 21 surrounded by red, signifying the traffic buildup. Her phone refreshed and the red inched toward her like the mercury of a thermometer. Her ETA increased.

The traffic rolled to a complete stop. No cars came from the other direction. She realized she would have to run.

She parked her car on the shoulder and got out. After a few strides, her Crocs slipped off. She grabbed them and continued in her socks. The rocks dug into her heels, and she felt her legs grow heavy. She prayed to God for wings.

At the scene, she didn't see a bus. A blue-and-yellow fire truck, ambulances and a few police cars were there. A police officer kept her at a distance. A woman who said she was the bus driver’s daughter introduced herself. She told Laura a boy had died.

Laura began to scream for her son. She dropped to her knees.

About five to 10 minutes later, the ambulances and fire truck moved, and Laura saw the disfigured bus and car. Above her, helicopters sputtered.

She called her husband and told him that a boy had died. He couldn’t speak and felt his heart lunge.

The Bastrop County crash is the deadliest involving a school bus in Texas since 2015, when a car in Houston smashed into a school bus and knocked it off an overpass bridge, killing two teens.

Companies construct school buses to be far safer than a regular car and, statistically, the buses are.

Texas Department of Transportation data show that in 2022, 12 people died every day on state roads. Since 2009, only 12 crashes involving a school bus have killed someone inside the bus, Texas Education Agency data show.

Of 244,092 Texans injured in traffic crashes in 2022, 1.8%, 4,481 were killed. By comparison, only 13 Texans have died on board a school bus during a crash since 2009, less than 0.2% of the 6,829 people injured.

Parents of children in the March 22 crash were shocked to learn the bus didn’t have seat belts.

Since the passage of a 2017 Texas law, any newly purchased bus must have seat belts. However, the law includes key exceptions for buses purchased before 2017 or for newly purchased buses constructed before 2017. Districts also can plead financial strain to avoid the requirement.

Even before the March 22 crash, the Hays school district planned to replace all its regular route buses that lacked seat belts. The day of the crash, Bus No. 1106 was one of just 15 of the district’s 72 daily-use buses without seat belts. All 15 were slated for replacement with newer versions within weeks.

Emergency responders had already gotten Ana Laura and Ivana into an ambulance before her husband, Gerardo, picked up the phone.

Ana Laura cried on the other end. She had been in an accident, she said, and then hung up the phone to focus on her daughter.

An emergency responder was talking to her. “Make sure she doesn’t fall asleep,” they told her. “Keep her awake.”

Ana Laura leaned next to Ivana, who was falling asleep. The medical personnel took Ana Laura’s phone and called Gerardo back. The EMS responder told him there had been an accident. They were taking his wife and daughter to Dell Children’s Medical Center.

In the background, he heard Ana Laura crying, “Stay awake. Stay awake. Stay awake.”

Gerardo got in his car and drove.

Patrol cars surrounded Tom Green Elementary when Eduardo Jimenez, Caleb’s father, arrived. As other parents raced into the school, Eduardo asked an office attendant for a list of the students involved in the crash. Caleb’s name was on the second page. It was the only name written in all capital letters.

Eduardo called his niece who worked at the hospital.

“Tío, hay dos caídos,” she told him. “Y uno de esos es un niño.” Uncle, there are two deceased. And one of those is a boy.

She didn’t know the name.

His heart sank.

By about 4:30 p.m. at the school gym, law enforcement officials began to tell parents where their children were. Many parents were waiting, calling family members or praying. Mauro's parents, Christopher and Jessica, had waited for about two hours. The officer who talked to the Spanish-speaking couple spoke in English. They best understood three words:

“Dell medical hospital.”

At the hospital, the couple found Mauro in a bed surrounded by nurses. He had a gouge on the right side of the scalp. His face was lined with thin cuts from glass, particularly near his jaw. He had similar cuts on his right hand. His clothes, to the side of the bed, were covered in blood.

Seeing his son brought Christopher relief. His appreciation, though, quickly became guilt. He tried to imagine what the parents of the deceased child, Ulises, felt at the moment.

Nine days after the crash, dozens of families from Tom Green Elementary and the surrounding Buda community gathered at St. Anthony Marie de Claret Catholic Church in Kyle to remember Ulises’ life. Among the hundreds were the Reza Flores and Rodriguez families.

The Reza Flores family used the funeral to explain death to Mauro. When the Mass had ended, the family watched a procession of cars drive away with the casket.

“Adios, Uli,” Mauro said, waving.

Everyone touched by what happened March 22 is still grieving — and angry, processing a confusing mix of emotions.

They watched a wave of news reports as authorities arrested and charged Hernandez on March 29 with criminally negligent homicide. As they learned details about what preceded the crash, including that investigators believe Hernandez might have dozed off shortly before the collision, many families felt Hernandez, who remains in the Bastrop County Jail, should never have been on the road.

Attorney Mark Macias declined to comment on behalf of the trucking company. Hernandez’s attorney, Thomas Fagerberg, told the Statesman he has faith in the legal system.

"I truly believe in the presumption of innocence," Fagerberg said. "It's premature to speculate as to the actual cause of this accident."

The parents are navigating life after the crash.

Mauro is more irritable about many things these days. He was always a quiet child, but he is even quieter now and has yet to share any memories about the crash.

In the weeks after the crash, Ana Laura and Gerardo have spent time at church, where their community prays for them. But mostly, the family wants to be together, resting.

Ivana, who always loved going to class, is afraid to be away from her mother. She used to love PE, but too much activity makes her nervous now. At school, she talked about seeing blood on her friends’ faces.

Caleb’s mother, Laura, drives him and his brother to children’s therapy in Bee Cave.

Her son screams some nights and carries plushies to bed, a new activity. He’s also startled by sudden movements in the car, like when the car bumped into the curb outside of the doctor’s office. Caleb trembled in the back row of seats.

“I’m wiggling, Mami,” he said.

Laura had been off antidepressants and away from therapy six months before the crash, but she has since returned to both.

“Yo tengo una familia que cuidar. Yo tengo que estar bien para ellos,” Laura said. I have a family to take care of. I have to be well for them.

One morning, as Laura drove her sons to Tom Green Elementary, she heard Caleb explain the crash to his older brother.

“Caleb, and what do you feel?” she asked.

“I feel like screaming,” he said.

“OK, baby. Well, you can scream,” she said.

And he did.

Ten days after the crash, it came time to remove Mauro’s staples. Christopher sat on the medical chair with Mauro on his lap. He gave his son his phone to play a game. The doctor counted eight staples, took out her tweezers and began to pick at them.

“One … two … three … four … five … six … seven … eight …”

Christopher counted. His son squirmed and squirmed, until it was over and medical personnel gave him a lollipop.

At home, Christopher and Jessica bathed their son, gently, working to avoid the scar. Weeks later, this has continued, with Mauro insisting the scar not be touched. Drying him, Jessica combs his hair from a part on his left side over the right, covering a hairless point where the scar remains, tender.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: A fatal field trip: Texas bus crash shattered victims' lives, revealed regulatory lapses