From the archive: Tragic 1991 Palm Springs Girl Scouts bus crash still haunts today

From the archive: This story originally published in The Desert Sun in July 2016. Wednesday, July 31, 2024, will be the 33rd anniversary of the crash.

Laughter and chatter filled the yellow school bus as it headed down Tramway Road. Dozens of Girl Scouts and their eight adult chaperones had just enjoyed a trip on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway after spending July 31 up in the San Jacinto Mountains with dozens of other teen-aged Scouts and couldn't wait to continue their two-week "California Dreamin' " tour.

Read more: Girl scout recalls how bus crash ended 'California Dream' | Crash survivor: 'I was just launched into the air' | Mary Bono: Community came together | Never seen before: Desert Sun file photos

A little more than a mile down the steep road, the bus had picked up excessive speed as it approached a curve. An adult sitting in the second row yelled at the driver to slow down. Headphones and radios fell to the floor. A passenger slid partially into the aisle as the bus driver — now pumping the brakes frantically — negotiated the curve and tried to slow the bus as it hurtled down the winding road.

The adult told the bus driver to apply the emergency brakes. The driver told her "nothing's working" and "everything's failed."

A little more than a mile later, as its speed continued to increase — to 64 mph — the bus closed in on a minivan driving ahead in the five-vehicle caravan. The bus driver began honking the horn and crossed into the opposing lane and passed the vehicle. The bus then plunged down the embankment and collided with several large boulders.

The mangled wreckage of the bus came to rest on its left side. The violent impact had separated the body of the bus from the chassis.

The bus driver and six passengers were killed that day — July 31, 1991. Another 47 passengers were injured.

A lengthy investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable accident cause was “the loss of speed control while descending Tramway Road because of the bus driver’s use of improper driving techniques for mountainous terrain. Contributing to the accident were the out-of-adjustment brakes, which had not been detected in the Mayflower Contract Services, Inc., maintenance reporting and inspection procedures."

Sunday marks the 25th anniversary of the tragic event that claimed the lives of Girl Scouts Zoe Jackson, 15, of Sangerville, Maine; Tammy Murray, 15, of Detroit; Jennifer Barnum, 16, of Rochester Hills, Mich.; Vicki Powell,15, of Fairburn, Ga., chaperone Laurel McDaniel, 30, of Norcross, Ga., staff adviser Doneta Schaeffer, 46, of Davenport, Iowa; and bus driver Richard A. Gonzales Jr., 23, of Bloomington, Calif.

That fateful day left a lasting impact on untold numbers of friends and family members of the deceased, on the survivors — who suffered physical injuries and emotional anguish — and on the first responders, healthcare workers and countless others who provided comfort and support during those first critical hours and in the days that followed.

Although a quarter-of-a-century has now passed, the memories, for many, are still vivid.

"The bus driver did a lot to save a lot of people," recalled Jamie Harris Harriott, one of the Girl Scouts who survived that day.

"He got (the bus) most of the way down the mountain. Last curve. If you look at Tramway Road, there weren’t a lot of other places we could have gone off of and survived."

Harriott, 15 at the time, remembers being launched out of her seat and through the air as the bus flew off the road.

"When the bus went off the road and launched, I remember leaving my seat and then everything just went silent – there were no noises," the Ontario resident said.

"All I saw was my own face. I know it sounds odd, you hear these stories so many times … it was like I was about a foot above myself just watching my body fly through the air. It was weird because I remember knowing it was me, but it wasn’t me. After that, the next thing I remember, I woke up, I don’t know how long I was out, but it couldn’t have been very long because the first people on the scene were the adults that were in the other bus."

Sitting near Harriott toward the front of the bus was Stephanie Kesterson Tomlinson of Cincinnati.

"I assume that I was ejected out because I don’t remember anybody getting me out. ... I remember being very, very, very, very hot and I remember laying on very hot rocks. It’s kind of been assumed that that’s probably where I landed. Where did I go? Did I go through the front, did I shoot through the back? I mean, I was in row No. 4, how would I get to the back? Did I get shot out through some window, but how would that happen? Those windows are so small. I have no idea."

She remembered the sun being intense.

"I just knew I was laying there and I couldn't breathe."

Tomlinson, then 16, suffered a punctured lung, left ankle fracture, skull fracture, punctured left eardrum and scalp and shoulder lacerations. To this day, she doesn't know if she was transported to Desert Hospital by ambulance or helicopter.

She spent four days in trauma ICU, followed by seven days on the trauma floor.

"I can remember a lot about that day, very clearly," said Heidi Anderson, who now serves as trauma program manager at Desert Regional Medical Center.

Desert Hospital received the most critically injured patients from the crash. Anderson was the charge nurse in the emergency room when the call came in. "It was a muggy, hot July day," she said. "At the time, we were in what we now consider the old emergency department, which is about a third of the size of where we are now — with probably a quarter of the resources that we have now at the hospital. It was kind of an uneventful day — you didn’t feel anything coming. It was kind of slow and sluggish and everybody kind of going along their normal kind of daily duties.

"I clearly remember receiving the first call," she said. "I got a call from dispatch that said they were en route to the scene – at that point they called it a school bus accident, so we all kind of regrouped immediately and said, 'What exactly does that mean?' Because when you get those calls, those are more just kind of informational, what we call 'head's up' to give us a little bit of a warning that there’s a big event happening – but it doesn’t give us what type of patients or how many or how critical."

Read more: Girl scout recalls how bus crash ended 'California Dream' | Crash survivor: 'I was just launched into the air' | Mary Bono: Community came together | Never seen before: Desert Sun file photos

Soon after, she received a call from the first paramedic on the scene, who was walking out to the wreckage and describing to Anderson what he was seeing.

"What types of patients, how many, kind of giving me an idea of the ages, how many were critical, versus how many were walking wounded. So it was that first snapshot – that’s probably one of the clearest moments for me because I can just remember feeling like I was there with him.

"That call ... gave us a real idea of, ‘Uh oh,’ we knew now that we had a lot of critical patients sitting out there, it was a rugged terrain, we were going to have issues of, ‘How are we going to get them off scene? And where were we going to put them in regards to how many we’re going to take at our hospital and how many we’re going to send out to Eisenhower and JFK. Once those things start happening, it’s amazing – you kind of go on autopilot – so I took a little more information from that paramedic and then I turned, what we called ‘turn the radio,’ over to another nurse in the department, so those nurses would then be the ongoing communication from the scene."

After Anderson turned over radio communication, she began to help ready the department for arrivals. Since it was summer, the emergency room was staffed with only about six nurses, so the call went out for more personnel. Soon, there were six or seven other nurses for every ER nurse ready to assist when the patients arrived.

"Our biggest priorities at that time were just getting the resources in," she said. "The next thing I knew ... people started showing up, equipment started showing up, supplies started showing up — everybody just went into this mode of, 'We're going to do what we need to do.'"

"The first people on the scene were reporting mass casualties," said then-Palm Springs Police Capt. Gary Boswell during a recent interview at the base of Tramway Road. "I was inside the station and we really had to roll everybody that we had no matter what their job was at the time to get enough people up here to make a safe accident scene and get the right resources here."

Boswell said at first he thought the "mass casualty" report had been overstated — "that we didn't have that kind of injury and fatality count — it was almost more than you could expect, certainly not in our little town, but it can happen anywhere."

Boswell, who as senior officer served as incident commander, established a command post and triage center at the road's edge on the San Jacinto Mountain hillside.

"It was my job to just make sure we got all of the resources whether they had to be taken off other calls or called from home and get our allies in place like the highway patrol because they have a major role in all ... school bus accidents. At that time, Supervisor Benoit was (CHP) Capt. John Benoit, so he was on our scene. He had an awful lot of good information for handling mass casualty accidents."

On the day of the crash, Benoit, who was serving at the time as Indio CHP commander, was conducting a staff meeting. He was immediately contacted to send the CHP's Major Accident Investigation Team (MAIT) to assist in the investigation. Benoit then headed to the scene, where the CHP helicopter he'd worked to get added to the departmental fleet and assigned to the Coachella Valley just two years earlier, sat uphill on Tramway Road, ready to deliver patients to Desert Hospital. In 1989, Benoit issued an order to establish a temporary emergency helipad in the parking lot at the hospital. Both actions were critical that day.

Once word spread about the accident, the community rallied and came together like nothing the Coachella Valley had seen since perhaps the World War II era.

"There were some real heroes," Boswell said. "People that worked that afternoon helping people up and out of the gully. ... It seemed like there was 100-plus care workers and officers and firefighters and ambulance drivers and even a cab driver who took some people off the mountain.

"It was a monumental day. Your hearts go out to all the parents who had kids on there -- because not all of the injuries are physical. Even the psychological injuries could be lifelong.

"Before the road got closed ... there were people coming up here that were actually walking all the way up there to see if they could help. We had doctors responding from the hospital. We had all kinds of people who just stepped up. Even the mayor at the time, Sonny Bono, was up here."

Bono, who raced to the scene as soon as the news broke, helped carry backboards, bearing injured Girl Scouts, up the rugged terrain to awaiting ambulances and helicopters. He provided comfort and helped in any way that was needed until the last bus crash victim was off the hill.

"I don’t know why this part is making me cry,” Harriott said. Bono “was down there just carrying gurneys up and doing anything that he could and he wasn’t there for the publicity, he wasn’t there to be in the spotlight at all. It was very clear that he just wanted to do what he could to help – he just needed to be there. He was carrying stretchers up the hill, putting girls in ambulances, putting girls in helicopters. Then afterwards, he and his wife Mary, they were at the hospital every day. They came and they brought food to all of us that night afterwards."

Rob Parkins, a former police officer who was Palm Springs' city manager at the time, said it was impossible to keep Bono away from the crash and, at one point, "some firefighters and I had to keep him from walking under the helicopter when it was landing, so he didn’t get his head chopped off."

Sonny's wife, Mary Bono, was also at the scene and remembers standing with him and looking up Tramway Road.

"It wasn't particularly steep at the point where the bus careened off the roadway, but we thought about the terror the girls endured while riding in a wild, out-of-control bus hurtling down the road," she said. "That reality was almost too difficult to fully grasp. It still is for me, to this day. The twisted metal mass of an iconic school bus is something especially tragic. I still cannot drive Tramway Road without remembering the vivid images of that day."

Parkins, now the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway's general manager, said it was an extremely difficult time.

"The crash, itself, was terrible with young people lying everywhere, and adults lying in the wreck.”

“It was horrific, but the response was immediate," said Tramway Executive Vice President Jim Whitmore , a 29-year Tram veteran. "First responders were on the scene at the same time as our own Tram staff. And the subsequent investigation was extraordinarily thorough. One of the changes that resulted was additional bus driver training. That is why — to this day — people may see empty buses being driven up and down Tramway practicing mountain driving skills."

"Going back 25 years, it almost seems like it was yesterday," said Desert Regional Medical Center trauma surgeon Dr. Frank Ercoli. "It’s one of those occasions in your life that stays with you and you remember. ... I was in the trauma intensive care unit at the time doing my usual afternoon rounds.

"The medical staff, the hospital, the emergency department, the administration all went in disaster mode, callback calls went out, medical staff and crew reported to the hospital in addition to those who were already here. We set staging areas outside of the emergency department, we sent a go-team to the scene to assist in the triage and determination of the condition of the patients. With the response from police, fire and medics from around the community, various transportation agencies … we coordinated things and within about 20 minutes here at Desert Regional Medical Center, we received I believe 23 or 24 of the sickest patients ... both by ground and by air."

Reports of the 3:24 p.m. crash came in just as the shifts were changing and those getting off of work stayed on, which gave the hospital twice as much staff to work the emergency.

According to the NTSB report, "Injured passengers were treated at the scene and transported within one hour and 14 minutes to local hospitals. Within 24 minutes of the first rescue unit's arrival, the most seriously injured were transported by helicopter to the nearest trauma center (Desert Hospital) located about four miles from the accident site. The last injured person was removed from the bus within 57 minutes after the incident was reported to the police."

Desert Hospital's emergency room, which was by now stocked with not only trauma surgeons and emergency physicians but general, orthopedic and plastic surgeons and pediatricians, was firing on all cylinders.

"It took until about 8:30 that night – or about five hours – to really sort out all the injuries," Ercoli said. "We did hundreds of X-Rays and hundreds of CAT scans. We had four or five radiologists in house, reading the films, the lab, the blood bank.  And then at 8:30 that night, we had a debriefing and basically determined our strategy and what the logistics would be going forward.

"It was a valiant effort," Ercoli said. "We had gardeners and landscapers and construction and maintenance crews from the hospital unloading the helicopters, transporting the patients."

"With the resources and the staff, it just went phenomenally well," Anderson said.

"You can have all the policies and the protocols, and you can plan and you can prepare for all these types of events. You can’t ever, ever prepare for the human response and that’s what I learned that day. I think that’s probably what gives me the highest level of confidence … is knowing that regardless of the type of event or the size of the event, people just step up and do the right thing. I think extraordinary circumstances bring out the extraordinary things in people ... It restores your faith in humanity."

The community really made the difference that fateful day, survivor Harriott said in a June interview.

"If the community hadn’t come together – and I mean the first responders, the second responders – all three hospitals were involved," she said.

"The community helped so many more people survive. It was all hands on deck. ... When you look at the wreckage, for only seven people to die, means that a lot went right and I credit a lot of that to the community. Yes, we all have emotional scars that we have lived with for 25 years, but I also think those would be a lot worse if the community didn’t do so much to help the healing process to start immediately."

Denise Goolsby is The Desert Sun's Storyteller columnist. She can be reached at Denise.Goolsby@DesertSun.com and on Twitter @DeniseGoolsby

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: From the archive: Tragic 1991 Palm Springs Girl Scouts bus crash still haunts today