Standard Star
$30M suit in school bus death
Gary Stern
The Standard-Star
March 22, 1996
The mother of a 14-year-old Greenburgh girl who was crushed to death by her school bus last month broke down and wept yesterday as lawyers announced a $30 million lawsuit against the bus company and bus driver.
Clutching a photo of her daughter, Andrea, to her chest, Sin-Chai Chen said she hoped the suit would prevent accidents like the one that took her daughter’s life on Feb. 8. Andrea Chen, a ninth-grader at Irvington Middle School, was killed when a drawstring from a jacket snagged in the bus’s handrail, pulling her under the rear tires as the bus pulled away.
“My daughter, Andrea Chen, is dead, and nothing can bring her back,” Sin-Chai Chen said in the lobby of the Westchester County courthouse. “This lawsuit can wake up the parents, bus companies and lawmakers. I do not want my daughter to die in vain.”
David E. Worby, the lawyer for Sin-Chai Chen and her husband, Michael Chen, said that negligence on the parts of Advance Transit Co. of Yonkers and the bus driver, Eugenio Cordero of Yonkers, led to Andrea Chen’s death. He said the family’s suit, filed in state Supreme Court, seeks $30 million in damages, including $10 million in punitive damages.
Worby said Advance Transit, the owner of the bus, ignored several warnings that a design flaw in the bus’s handrail needed to be corrected. Five students have died across the nation since 1991 after their clothing caught on bus handrails. And the federal government has issued three voluntary recalls, calling for bus handrails to be modified.
Worby also said that Cordero ignored a section of state traffic law that requires school bus drivers to wait until students are 15 feet from the bus before pulling away. The state Education Department concluded a day after the accident that Cordero was likely at fault.
“What compounds what the bus company did not do,” Worby said, “is that they employed a driver who didn’t abide by the simplest law on the books.”
Cordero, who has not commented on the accident, will face a state Department of Motor Vehicles hearing soon to determine whether he should lose his commercial driver’s license, DMV spokesman Tom Apple said. The hearing, not yet scheduled, will be held in Yonkers.
Roy Pereira, a dispatcher for Advance Transit, said yesterday that Cordero is not driving for the Company. Pereira said company officials would not comment on the lawsuit until the lawyers and insurance company review it.
The Westchester County District Attorney’s Office and Greenburgh police are still investigating the accident, which occurred on Taxter Road in Greenburgh.
Andrea Chen’s death sent local school districts scurrying to make sure their buses’ handrails did not have dangerous gaps that could catch knots or tassels at the end of drawstrings. Most districts and their bus companies said they had already installed rubber washers in the handrail gaps.
The state Department of Transportation is preparing to require handrail compliance for the first time. That means buses will be taken off the road if inspectors find dangerous handrails, DOT spokesman Michael Fleischer said.
The manufacturer of the bus that killed Andrea Chen, Navistar International in Chicago, said it sent three federal recall notices on bus handrails to all its buyers between June 1993 and June 1995. Chuck King International, a Brooklyn bus dealership that bought the bus and sold it to Advance Transit, has said its records show that the recall notices were sent to Advance Transit.
Irvington Schools Superintendent Richard Hajek, who had not been aware of the handrail issue before Chen’s death, said he has been assured by the DOT that Advance Transit has modified the handrails properly.