Fall '03 Edition
Just one day
Zack Creglow
Daily Egyptian
 Derek Anderson ~ Daily EgyptianJaney Fair in a sullen moment as she speaks about the night when her daughter Shannon perished. Behind her sits a plush, red makeshift memorial to the 27 victims who died along with her daughter on May 14, 1988. |
RADCLIFF, Ky. - The night of May 14, 1988, was far worse than every mother's worst nightmare. Nothing could awaken Janey Fair from the brutal reality - she was all alone. She was by herself on the night when she needed a familiar hug or hand to hold onto, some refuge to distract the worry. Her husband, Larry, had left that morning to pick up his mother in Johnson City, Tenn. - the family's hometown - while her 16-year-old son, Donald, had gone to stay with her sister, Gloria.
But it was another absence that caused the grief and the tears and the torment as she waited amid a throng of unfamiliar faces at the Radcliff First Assemblies of God Church. She received a phone call around 1 a.m., explaining there had been an accident, and all the voice on the other end said was that she needed to hurry to the church. She had never even seen or heard of the church before her daughter Shannon told her she was invited to go to King's Island, a theme park in Cincinnati, by some members of the congregation.
To Fair, the faces that waited with her were all John and Jane Does, but each was going through the same emotional firestorm as she. A happy ending that night meant going to the hospital to see their children in the burn unit. Others, like Fair, waited, oblivious to the whereabouts of their children, left only to guess and ponder the extremes of what their conditions could be. After a while, silence was the worst news one could hear.
"I was just praying they would find her in the hospital," Fair said.
For eight hours she sat in solitude at the church, running different scenarios through her head. It was less than 24 hours ago when she had said 'goodbye' to Shannon as she left with the rest of group for King's Island at 6 a.m. Now the only thought that permeated her mind was whether or not it would be their last goodbye.
"I remember seeing the sun shine through her hair and remember thinking how perfect she looked," Fair recalled from that morning.
The night before, Shannon and her best friend, Mary Daniels, spent the night being young teenage girls, trying on different outfits and preparing for next day.
In many ways, Shannon was a typical teenager. But in just as many ways, she was ahead of her time. In her 14 years, Shannon's future appeared boundless - she was intelligent, talented and beautiful beyond her years. Fair recalls numerous times when people thought she was at least six years older.
It was 11 p.m. on that Saturday night. James Dunn was about to watch the weather on the nightly news when his phone rang. Dunn had been the Carroll County coroner for eight years, and what the operator on the phone said appeared to be the same as he had heard a thousand times before: vehicle wreck on Interstate Highway 71, along the winding, rolling hills of Northern Kentucky.
"I had no idea what I was going to," Dunn remembers. "I went down and loaded up my equipment and left."
When he arrived at the crash site about 30 minutes later, he could have never fathomed the scene. Dunn was expecting the usual single-car accident that often occurred on that stretch of road, so he only loaded up the hearse with one gurney to haul off the deceased.
At first, the only thing he could do to help was stay out of the way. Emergency workers from across the state worked frantically to save as many lives as they could, taking the victims away in ambulances and helicopters to any hospital in the state. Dunn, loaded with one stretcher, was in the midst of the country's deadliest drunk driving crash ever. The single-car accident he had anticipated couldn't have been further from the surreal truth.
A church bus, loaded with 67 passengers, had been turned into a deadly incinerator after the gas tank was punctured when Larry Mahoney, driving his pickup truck, veered into the southbound lane heading north and smashed head-on into the front side of the bus.
Children lay alongside the interstate with their clothing singed onto their scorched skin, and some victims' skin melted from the heat that suffocated the bus. The rotors of the helicopters mixed the screams of pain and agony in a sickening melody.
Mahoney had been drinking on and off throughout the day after finishing his overnight shift at M & T Chemical Plant in Carrollton. His blood alcohol level was at .24, more than twice Kentucky's legal limit of .10. Afterward, the police found a six-pack of beer in the back of his truck still ice cold. His chance of survival was greater than many of the children on the side of the road, forcing emergency workers to airlift him to the hospital instead of the children because his state was a higher priority.
Mahoney's life was spared, and today the only scar that remains is the memory that his drinking and driving resulted in 27 deaths, 24 of which were only children.
After a few minutes of standing aside, a state trooper walked over to Dunn to inform him his presence was needed inside the bus.
Inside, Dunn's flashlight uncovered charred bodies, stacked up on top of each other. The bodies faced the rear exit, depicting a last-minute attempt for survival. The rear exit was too narrow, though, and only a few managed to escape.
Dunn attempted to assess the number of fatalities. The bodies were so badly burned there was no way to indicate the sex of the victims. But from the size of the bodies, he could decipher many were children. In his head he tallied somewhere close to 17 or 18 deceased.
"I thought, 'This is a nightmare.' I hoped I would wake up and realize this was just a nightmare. But this was something I had to do," Dunn exclaimed.
Dunn receded back to the bus and entered the sultry tomb. The bodies were still steaming and filled the bus with the nauseating stench of burned human carcasses. Every direction he moved his flashlight, he saw smoldering meat and bone, flesh vacuumed airtight to ribcages.
"It was something that no human being will ever forget," Dunn said.
Shannon Fair was among those unrecognizable in the heap of bodies. Near her was best friend Mary Daniels.
Dunn phoned his wife and told her to call Dr. George Nichols, the state medical examiner. She told him that Nichols had been notified and had left his Louisville home and was on his way.
When Nichols arrived, the two did another survey of the bus. They came to the conclusion that the crash would tie up traffic on the interstate for days. So to bypass any future dilemmas, the site had to be literally moved before they could remove the bodies.
Cranes loaded the bus onto a flatbed truck that transported the bus, fatal victims and all, to the National Guard Armory in Carrollton. The emergency crews worked around the clock, dissecting the interior of the bus seat by seat in order to remove the bodies.
Dunn's night ended around 6:30 a.m., after American Red Cross arrived to debrief the workers who had seen a lifetime of hell in the span of half a day.
"They tried to counsel all of us," Dunn said. "There was and still is a lot of people that are still having a hard time dealing with this."
Around the same time, Fair received some form of news. But after eight hours of watching other families depart to visit their children at the hospital, the news was what she feared the most. There would be no happy ending for the Fair household.
Her daughter Shannon was among the deceased. Her beauty had been morphed into a figure that days later would be hidden underneath the mask of a closed casket.
"I want you to remember them how they were, not how they are now," Fair remembers the medical examiner telling her before she and other families had to attempt to identify the charred bodies of their children's remains.
The death of Shannon Fair was more than just a youth dying too soon. It ran deeper, as did all the deaths of that night, with the context weighing heavily on the hearts that loved them.
After May 14, 1988, there would never be anymore whining to stay up another 15 minutes, no more asking Janey to comb out her long, vibrant red hair, no more hearing her laughter. There would only be a tombstone.
That night, her daughter and 26 other individuals were forever taken from this earth, their chance to leave their own mark in life stolen.
Some 15 years later, their impression on this world was left in death. But some good, as much that can be derived from 27 innocent deaths, did result. Stricter bus standards and DUI laws were championed by state and national legislatures and thus were their lasting legacy.
The man who drove the wrong way down the four-lane highway and smashed into the bus was sentenced to 16 years. During his imprisonment, Fair said Mahoney had a successful rehabilitation from his alcoholism. He was released in 1999 on parole. Since then he has become a recluse and reportedly lives with his parents. He recently married his long-time girlfriend who stayed with him during the prison term.
Fair became a leading activist in the fight against drinking and driving, recently serving as the vice president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Shannon's room was emptied when the Fairs renovated their Radcliff home, but her memory is very much alive.
Dunn remains the Carroll County coroner and runs the Dunn-Graham funeral home. He is in the business of death, but the thought of May 14, 1988, still cracks his baritone voice and Southern drawl.
"I've been doing this too long," Dunn now says after 23 years serving as county coroner.
Every time he drives his car on Interstate 71, he is reminded of that. Maybe it has been too long; maybe it has been too much death to witness in one lifetime. Maybe that night 15 years ago was. Just maybe.
His reminder stands somewhere near mile marker 39 just outside of Carrollton where a large but lonely green sign reads, "The site of the fatal bus crash on May 14,1988."
"The one thing I hate about it is they call it and will call it the 'Carroll County accident,"' Dunn said. "But neither the children who were in the crash nor the fellow that hit the bus were from Carroll County, but it will forever be the 'Carroll County accident."'
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