From the Herald-Leader 2-28-1988.

CAUSE OF '58 BUS DISASTER STILL A MYSTERY

Crash that killed 27 left its mark on survivors

Prestonsburg--The morning of Feb. 28, 1958 was cloudy and cold, but the pavement on old U.S. 23 above Lancer was dry.
About 7 a.m., bus driver John Alex DeRossett began his usual route from
Cow Creek to consolidated schools in Prestonsburg, stopping to collect students in the communities of Sugar Loaf and Emma.
The bus would never reach the schools.  It would plunge into Levisa Fork
of the Big Sandy River, killing 26 students and the bus driver. The crash happened 30 years ago today and remains the worst
school bus accident in U.S. history.

DeRossett was on schedule.  Unlike an older bus he had driven the day before--a bus one student described as having its rear
emergency door wired shut--Bus No. 27 had just been serviced.
About 8:10 a.m. , three miles east of Prestonsburg at the mouth of Knotley Hollow, DeRossett pulled off the main road where
two 14-year-old freshman girls, Ezelle Pennington and Joyce Matney, stood hugging their books and waiting with six other
students. Joyce, a band member, and Ezelle were best friends.  both wore fashionably long skirts, bobby socks, loafers and
sweaters.  A week earlier, they had rdred identical Easter outfits.  Now, they discussed a forthcoming Prestonsburg High
School basketball game. With them stood Joyce Matney's little sister, Rita Cheryl, 8, who had blue-green eyes and reddish
hair.  Rita Cheryl was "a doll--the prettiest little girl that ever was," said Ezelle Pennington Copley, now 44 and a resident of
East Point.
The eight students climbed aboard.  Someone asked Joyce Matney what her grandfather's pickup was doing "down there in the
ditch line." About 200 yards down the highway, a pickup was mired to its axles in the ditch alongside the road.  A wrecker
driven by Donald "Dootney" Horn was
maneuvering across the road to pull it out. Because the bus was almost full, Joyce and Ezelle took separate seats. Joyce and her
little sister took seats near the front of the bus, while
Ezelle found one near the back, a section routinely reserved for older boys.
As DeRossett changed gears, Janice Blackburn, 14, sitting with her feet against the top of a rear wheel well, loked up from her
book.  She saw Horn's wrecker and went back to reading.
In the back of the bus, the older boys spotted the wrecker and someone predicted the bus would hit it, said Donald Dillon  of
Prestonsburg, who was an eighth grader.  "He had plenty of time to stop if he'd wanted to. Dillon does not recall a collision.
But Isaac Vanderpool, then 17, who
was sitting behind the driver, said that DeRossett yelled when the bus struck the wrecker's left rear bumper and fender.
Aroused students began screaming, too, when the bus turned a hard left
and started toward the river, striking a parked car and narrowly missing a trailor owned by Bennie Blackburn, Ezelle Pennington
Copley remembers watching Blackburn's trailor flash by
as the bus slid head-first down the riverbank. "I remember thinking, "We're going to hit the trees any second," she said.  "But
there were no trees.  The water was over the trees. Half in the water, half out, the bus bobbed on the muddy surface like a
yellow fishing boat for a few minutes.  Some said one minute, others five.

DeRossett was apparently knocked unconscious.  As water gushed in through the broken windshield, many children sat in
stunned silence. Others cried out and leaped into the aisle.
Near the back of the bus, the freezing water closed around the waist ofWilliam Leedy, 13, who said he blacked ut briefly after
the bus struck the wrecker.  In the mounting chaos, the boy made his way to the rear emergency door and, after turning a
handle, kicked it open. "I went in the water first--we were about 30 feet out, it seems like--and the boys started jumping out,"
Leedy recalled.
"Its lucky I was a good swimmer.  I got hold of Jerry Leslie first and pulled him to the riverbank and then just kept going
back--as long as they were screaming and hollering."

In the bus, Donald Dillon and his older brother, Winston, 17, prepared to jump into the river.  One boy, Bucky Ray Jarrell, 14,
"was with us back there, but he went back up front to get his sister and didn't come back," Donald Dillon said. "I remember him
yelling her name.  'Katie'."
All over the bus, brothers and sisters were trying to find each other, Ezelle Copley said.  Others reported seeing terrified small
children huddled together in seats, hugging each other.
One boy, David Wright, 14, escaped through an open window and pulled two smaller children after him, Donald Dillon
said.Ezelle scrambled over three seats to get to the emergency door where a
small boy stood, frozen, refusing to jump into the water until his
brother arrived, she said."I told him his brother was already out of the bus, so he jumped," she
said. "It wasn't true.  His brother didn't get out.  But I still don't know if that little kid hadn't jumped whether I'd had enough
nerve to jump myself." She does not recall exactly how she got to shore.  Others were flailing in the water.  Witnesses said,
Horn, the wrecker driver, and Blackburn,
 slid down the bank and helped save several children.Blackburn later spoke of "seeing little kids hanging on to branches and
being swept away," Ezelle Copley said.  Blackburn died years later.
Climbing the riverbank, Ezelle looked back and saw the bus, almost submerged, with small arms and hands sicking out of the
windows. As the vehicle went under, Isaac Vanderpool swam the length of the bus underwater and got out through the
emergency door.At the last minute, William Leedy grabbed a small girl by the hair.  But the current was so strong, he said, that
it swept her away, laving him with a handful of hair.Jeff Gunnell, who was 14, remembers standing on the riverbank and
watching the bus disappear.  "I don't think that I realized then that everybody didn't get ff," he said, "but you loked around and
there weren't many people there."The river's heavy current rolled the bus across the river and about 250 yards downstream.  It
took Army engineers and volunteers 53 hours to find the battered vehicle. "We just couldn't believe smething as big as a
schoolbus could be in the
river and we couldn't find it," said Floyd County Judge-Executive John M. Stumbo, who was a member of he school board.
Thousands of people lined the riverbank and gasped as two bulldozers
pulled the wreckage ashore, a girl's body hanging limply from the emergency door.
"Eveybody on the banks just died away," Stumbo said.Volunteers found only 15 bodies in the mud-filled bus.  It took another
69 days before the last child, a 9-year-old girl, was found.
In the agonizing aftrmath, no daylight hour passed without boats patrolling the rive or men trampling the banks.  No night passed
wthout volunteers patrolling five bridges under the glare of 88 million
candlepower searchlights. Ron Hager was a Prestonsburg High sophomore who lived at David.  "You could see the lights in the
sky from here," said Hager, who is now assistant Floyd County school superintendent. William Jarrell of Sugar Loaf, a coal
miner, said his son's body was
found in the bus but it was 40 days before volunteers found Katie, his 13-year-old daughter, seven miles downstream at Auxier.
Meanwhile, Jarrell found a small boat and traveled 100 miles down the
Big Sandy to the Ohio River at Cattlesburg, seaching for his daughter. The trip took three days, he said, and he would not have
stopped except that the Ohio "was just so wide." "If they hadn't found her, I don't know whether I would have ever quit
looking," he said.Three of 16 families involved in the fatalities lost all their children. Among them were storekeeper James B.
Goble and his wife, Virginia, whose two sons, James Edward, 12, and John Spencer, 11, and a daughter, Anna
Laura, 9, were drowned. Two children were lost from each of four other families.  Among them
were Joyce Matney and her little sister, Rita Cheryl. The dead children ranged in age from 8 to 17.
"It's the worst thing that's ever happened in Floyd County," said Josephine Davidson Fields, an 84-year-old Prestonsburg
woman.  "The very worst thing."

List of Victims
Dois Faye Burchett, 15, of Emma
James Edison Carey, 9, of Emma
Glenda May Cisco, 17, and her brother,
Kenneth Forest Cisco, 14, of Sugar Loaf
Sandra Faye Cline, 8, and her sister,
Paulette Cline, 9, of Lancer
Emogene Darby, 17, of Cow Creek
Linda Darby, 14, of Cow Creek
John Alex DeRossett, 27, of Water Gap
James Edward Goble, 12, his brother,
John Spencer Goble, 11, and his sister,
Anna Laura Goble, 9, of Emma
Jane Carol Harris, 14, of Emma
John Harlan Hughes Jr., 13, of Emma
Margaret Louise Hunt, 15, of Cow Creek
Bucky Ray Jarrell, 14, and his sister,
Katie Carol Jarrell, 13, of SugarLoaf
Marcella Jervis, 14, of Emma
Montaine Jervis, 15, of Endicott
Thomas Roosevelt Jervis, 13, of Buffalo Creek
Kathryn Justice, 16, of Endicott
Nannie Joyce McPeek, 17, of Lancer
Joyce Ann Matney, 14, and her sister,
Rita Cheryl Matney, 8, of Lancer
James L. Meade Jr., 9, of Lancer
James Thomas Ousley, 15, of Lancer
Randy Scott Wallen, 17, of Lancer