Casey Feldman Foundation Awards 4th Annual Transportation Safety Reporting Award to Austin American-Statesman Reporters for Its Series On Deadly Texas School Bus Crash
The field trip for 41 preschool students from the Tom Green Elementary School in Buda Texas was supposed to be a day of discovery and wonder.
For most, if not all, it was their first trip to the zoo, and a feeling of joyous anticipation took hold as they boarded the bus on March 22, 2024.
The visit to the Capital of Texas Zoo went off without a hitch, but the return trip became what is surely a deep-seated fear for many parents of school age children. The school bus carrying the children and one dozen adult supervisors was traveling west on state highway Texas 21 when it was hit by an oncoming cement truck that had crossed the highway divider.
Though the school bus driver tried to avoid the oncoming truck, his efforts were to no avail. The bus was pushed off the roadway and then flipped over. The truck kept going, however, and crushed a gray Hyundai into the guardrail. One child in the bus and the driver of the Hyundai died.
Dozens of children and adults were injured.
In the aftermath, three reporters at the Austin American- Statesman spent months digging into the circumstances surrounding the crash, the deadliest school bus accident in a decade. Now, the resulting series of articles examining the crash and its impact on the victims has been named the winner of fourth annual Casey Feldman Award for Transportation Safety Reporting.
Texas Does Not Require School Buses to Have Seatbelts
What the newspaper found was that the crash could have been prevented or its harm greatly reduced had Texas and federal authorities taken steps to keep the driver of the truck off the road and equip school buses with seat belts.
Told in a narrative style, the series provides a granular and moving account of the day’s events leading up to the crash and the ongoing efforts of the injured children and their parents to cope with the fallout.
“We were able to go beyond what just happened and the issues of black and white regulation and put a human face on (the crash),” said Tony Plohetski, an investigative reporter at the Austin American-Statesman. Plohetski shared the award with education reporter Keri Heath and Tahui Gomez, who reports on Latino communities for the newspaper.
Heath brought her background reporting on education systems, and since many of the victims in the crash were Latino, Gomez brought entrée and insights that added telling details.
Joel Feldman, who along with his wife Dianne Andersen founded the Casey Feldman Foundation, the sponsor of the award, said the series exemplifies the ways that investigative journalism can expose risks to public safety and spur officials to make improvements.
“If you think about it, why would we have seat belts in our cars, but not in our school buses to protect our children?” Feldman asked. “Additionally, because of this series, Texas, and other states, will be able to access the federal data bases to help states keep dangerous drivers off the roads. The incredible work in this series highlighted these issues. It took a tragedy, but hopefully progress will be made and future tragedies prevented.”
Truck Driver Had A Long History of Violations and Had Been on a List of Prohibited Commercial Truck Drivers at the Time of the Crash
The driver of the cement truck, Jerry Hernandez, 42, had a long record of traffic violations and had struggled with substance abuse for years, but managed to continue to work as a commercial truck driver despite the infractions. He told police he had been using cocaine and marijuana in the hours before the crash and had gotten little sleep the night before.
Hernandez had been placed on a federal list of prohibited commercial truck drivers for refusing to take a test for controlled substances. He’d also over the years sought substance abuse treatment on several occasions.
But he tested positive for marijuana in 2022 and for cocaine in April of 2023. Following that test, he entered treatment but failed to complete it.
The federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration compiles records of commercial drivers who fail substance abuse tests, and it requires that employers check its database before making a hire, and on an annual basis for drivers who remain employed by them.
But Hernandez’s employer, FJM Concrete Pumping, never ran Hernandez name through the database. Over the years, the company compiled a spotty record for checking up on its drivers and had paid a $316 fine to the state of Texas in 2021 for employing an unlicensed driver.
In all, Hernandez drove for 11 months on the federal prohibited list, but he was never flagged. While the federal government has limited means for enforcing its prohibitions, Texas authorities, who are on the front lines of traffic enforcement, have only scant access to the federal database, creating a large loophole for dangerous drivers.
Texas’ Inability to Access Federal Database and Governor Abbott’s Directive Diverting State Troopers From Traffic Enforcement to Immigration Exacerbated the Problem
Texas authorities now are in the process of acquiring access under a federal law that requires states to link their systems with the federal records and suspend the licenses of drivers that are on the prohibited list. Too late, to protect the Tom Green elementary school children.
Further undermining enforcement, the newspaper found, was a policy directive by Gov. Greg Abbott to divert state troopers from traffic enforcement and other duties to the southern border with Mexico to deter illegal immigration.
Transportation Safety Reporting Award Given in Honor of Casey Feldman, An Aspiring Reporter Who Was Kiled by a Distracted Driver in 2009
The award is given by the Casey Feldman Foundation in conjunction with the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, and Cambridge Mobile Telematics. The winners this year will receive a $3,000 cash award and an expense paid trip to Boulder to meet with faculty and students of the journalism program. The award honors Casey Feldman, a 21-year-old communications major and award-winning journalist at Fordham University who was killed July 17, 2009, when she was runover in a crosswalk in Ocean City, New Jersey by a distracted delivery van driver.
Following her death, Casey’s parents, Joel Feldman and Dianne Anderson, created the foundation and its sponsored project, Endd.org to raise public awareness about the dangers of distracted driving and to encourage drivers and passengers to end the practice.
NHTSA Analysis Finds Distracted Driving Kills More Than 10,000 Every Year
Distracted driving remains a major ongoing hazard on American highways. In a study of 2019 accident statistics, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said crashes involving at least one driver who was distracted resulted in 10,596 fatalities that year. In all, distracted driving was implicated in 1.3 million non-fatal injuries, and 5.6 million vehicles were damaged. The agency estimated that the total cost of this carnage was $98.2 billion.
Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a data collection and analysis firm founded by MIT scientists in 2010, says that in 34 percent of crashes the driver was holding a cell phone in the minute before the crash. The company, which measures and analyzes data from 10 million drivers every day, uses smart phones and auto tags that communicate directly with insurers among other devices to collect and sift through data that can show in real time when a driver is distracted.
Cell phone use is detected by CMT sensors when the phone is physically moved or when the phone screen is activated.
The judges for this year’s competition were Chuck Plunkett, director of the capstone CU News Corps course at the college and Kirk Siegler, a national correspondent for NPR.
Said Siegler, in a release put out by the college, “I was immediately enthralled by the character driven narratives of the crash victims’ parents.”
The series, he said, “highlighted in clear language, the gaps and failures across the system – and namely, in regulations – that led up to the tragedy.”
The runner up entry in this year’s competition was a seven-part investigation on truck crashes in Texas by Austin’s KXAN.
