An official video from a Texas school district shows the moment a cement truck swerved into oncoming traffic and collided with a school bus carrying more than 40 pre-K students returning from a zoo field trip. The incident occurred on March 22, resulting in the bus rolling over on a rural highway outside Austin. (Hays Consolidated Independent School District via AP)
The driver of the cement truck, who crashed into a school bus causing the death of a 5-year-old boy and another man, reportedly admitted to the police that he had used cocaine and marijuana in the hours leading up to the accident.
Harrowing dashcam video of the crash depicted Jerry Hernandez’s cement truck drifting over the centerline and colliding head-on with the bus on the rural Texas road outside of Austin around 2 p.m. on March 22. The bus flipped several times before coming to a stop. An SUV was also involved in the collision, resulting in the death of its driver.
Legal documents indicate that Hernandez, 42, is facing a charge of criminally negligent homicide. Multiple local media reports, citing an arrest affidavit, stated that Hernandez confessed to the police that he had smoked marijuana at around 10 p.m. the day before and had used cocaine around 1 a.m. on the day of the crash. He had only slept for about three hours.
Hernandez allegedly attempted 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 that there were no cars in front of him. Hernandez was arrested by the police on Friday and taken to the Bastrop County Jail.
The school bus from the Hays Consolidated Independent School District was transporting 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 on the bus.
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Several children sustained severe injuries. Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, 5, died. Authorities from 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.”