Shortly thereafter, she reported, they entered the long downhill grade and the brakes “just failed completely.” The bus began picking up speed. The driver said that she could not slow it by using either the service or emergency brakes. Brake odor was strong. The rear wheels began smoking. She said that she had overridden the automatic transmission and shifted down to second gear, but that did not help. She said that she had then grabbed the radio to call her dispatcher, but had to drop the microphone in order to wrestle the wheel to keep the bus on the road. For six miles she succeeded, shouting at the students and teachers to “lean left!” and “lean right!” Finally the bus had contacted the outside guardrail, run along it, and gone over the embankment. “I don’t know what else I could have done!” said the driver during the interview. She was weeping at that point. Her report agreed with the interview testimony Dar had taken from the surviving teacher and students.

The driver—overweight, pasty-faced, and thin-lipped—seemed stupid and somewhat bovine to Dar, but he had to discount his own perceptions. The older he got and the longer he worked in accident investigation, the more stupid most people seemed to him. And more and more women tended to appear bovine in the years since the death of his wife.

His people checked the driver’s record. The TV stations and papers had reported that she had “a perfect safety record with the district,” and this was true, but it was also true that she had only worked for the district for six months prior to the accident. According to DMV reports from Tennessee, where the driver had lived before moving to California, she’d been issued one DUI citation and two moving violations in five years. In California the bus driver held a school bus certificate (passenger transportation endorsement) issued two days before her employment by the district and had a valid California class B (commercial driver) license restricted to conventional buses with automatic transmissions only.