Nine people were injured, four of them seriously, when an unlicensed teen driver collided head-on with a school bus on a suburban highway in New York’s Westchester County yesterday.
According to police, the accident happened just after 2 pm Wednesday on Lake Road in the city of New Castle. The driver of a Honda Accord, an unidentified 16-year-old from Bedford Hills, was traveling southbound without a license with three passengers in his car when he lost control of the vehicle around a curve.
The car veered into the lanes of oncoming traffic and crashed head-on into the school bus. The four people inside the Accord were taken to Westchester Medical Center with life-threatening injuries, New Castle police said.
The ages of the people on the Yorktown Central School District school bus were not immediately clear. Although police did not say how many occupants were in that vehicle, the hospital received nine patients as a result of the accident, which would mean that five of the injured were from the bus and those were in stable condition, he said. NBC News.
It was unclear how and why the driver lost control of the sedan he was driving. Police did not say whether the driver had a learner’s permit, which would allow him to be on local roads as long as he has a passenger who is at least 21 years old. It was also not clear how old the occupants of that car were.
The car was later separated from the bus and towed away from the scene. The road where the accident occurred was closed for hours, but it was reopened last night.
In a similar case, this month Anthony Reyes was sentenced to seven years in prison for stealing a school bus in Brooklyn (NYC) in 2021 and crashing into a building and vehicles, leaving several people injured, prosecutors announced.
Last month a school bus with students and teachers on board was hit by a stolen BMW luxury vehicle in Newark, the most populous city in New Jersey. According to local police, the juvenile driver of the stolen vehicle and two minor passengers on board fled but were arrested.
In the fall of 2020 Andy Sánchez passed away after spending more than a month hospitalized after crashing the school bus he was driving in the city of New Windsor, Orange County (NY). A 6-year-old girl was also seriously injured but survived.
In September 2021, a Hispanic school bus driver in Long Island (NY) was arrested for operating a vehicle while intoxicated with children on board, police said. Days later, a stolen school bus carjacker crashed several cars in Brooklyn.
In December 2022, seven children were injured when a school bus crashed into a house in New Hempstead, a suburb of New York City.
Last January a man crashed the school bus he was driving into a New Jersey home and was later arrested for allegedly being drunk behind the wheel.
The New York authorities recall that there is zero tolerance for drivers who speed and/or drive under the influence of alcohol.