Dash camera video released by a Texas school district shows the moment a cement truck veered into oncoming traffic, hitting a school bus carrying more than 40 pre-K students returning from a zoo field trip. The deadly collision on March 22 sends the bus rolling over on a rural highway outside Austin. (Hays Consolidated Independent School District via AP)
The concrete truck driver who crashed into a school bus which caused the death of a 5-year-old boy and a man in another vehicle allegedly told cops he took cocaine and smoked marijuana in the hours before the accident.
Harrowing dashcam video of the crash showed Jerry Hernandez’s concrete truck drifting over the centerline and hitting the bus head on along the rural Texas road outside of Austin around 2 p.m. March 22. The bus flipped several times before coming to a stop. An SUV also was involved in crash, killing its driver.
Court records show Hernandez, 42, is facing a criminally negligent homicide charge. Multiple local media outlets, citing an arrest affidavit, reported Hernandez admitted to police that he had smoked marijuana around 10 p.m. the day before and took cocaine around 1 a.m. the day of the crash. He had only had about three hours of sleep.
Hernandez allegedly tried to claim that an SUV about two lengths in front of him suddenly braked, causing him to swerve, however video from the bus dash cam showed there were no cars in front of him. Cops arrested Hernandez on Friday and took him to the Bastrop County Jail.
The school bus from the Hays Consolidated Independent School District was carrying more than 40 pre-K students and 10 adults who were returning from a field trip at the Capital of Texas Zoo. There were no seat belts for the people aboard the bus.
Several children suffered serious injuries. Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, 5, died. Authorities with the Texas Department of Public Safety identified the man who died in the SUV as 33-year-old Ryan Wallace. Local NBC affiliate KXAN reported that Wallace was a journalism student at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Ulises was a child who was filled with a lot of happiness and he often shared it with others,” Naira (Dina) Solís Shears, his pre-K bilingual teacher from Tom Green Elementary told KXAN. “He had a talent for drawing and his favorite thing to draw was dinosaurs. He could almost completely spell the word dinosaur, which demonstrates how smart he was. He always had a dinosaur drawn on all of the assignments he turned in. He liked to tell stories and shared many with his friends and family. Above all — he was a loving child.”
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