BOTHELL — Stewart O’Leary, a bus driver at Northshore School District, was driving a basketball team to a game on Feb. 7 when a metal bar flew through the windshield and struck his chest.
O’Leary suffered a hematoma to his chest, scratches on his face from the flying glass, and a possible bruised bone.
He returned to work three days later.
“Put me in, coach,” he texted to his dispatcher Feb. 9, the day of the Super Bowl.
“I was doing OK,” O’Leary said Friday. “There was some soreness, don’t get me wrong, but I was like, ‘I could do this.’ I felt comfortable with performing my duty as a bus driver safely.”
On Feb. 7, the North Creek High School girls basketball team was scheduled to play at Mount Si High School, about 40 miles away. As he’s done before, O’Leary was tasked to drive the team.
O’Leary was traveling south on I-405 at about 60 mph just before Bellevue on the way to Mount Si. He had just changed lanes when he felt the “violent” impact that knocked the wind out of him.
After the bar struck him at high speed, O’Leary began moaning and clutching his chest. He never lost control of the bus.
“My instinct was I needed to keep the bus in compliance and not do anything stupid,” he said. “I let off the throttle immediately.”
Calvin McHenry and Chris Pinder, two coaches on the bus, immediately got up and helped O’Leary steer the bus to the side of the road and called 911.
“It’s just remarkable that he was able to keep the bus going straight after such a sudden event occurring,” Pinder told Good Morning America on Friday. “He’s a really, really great guy.”
Before emergency responders came, O’Leary was able to call the district’s bus dispatch to arrange for a tow truck and another bus to bring the basketball team to their game.
As he was getting off the bus, one of the coaches put the rusted metal bar on the dashboard, but O’Leary stopped him.
“I said, ‘That’s coming with me!’ I needed a souvenir,” O’Leary said.
The windshield ended up at Northshore’s transportation center, where it’s hanging on the wall along with notes of appreciation from O’Leary’s coworkers and photos he took during the aftermath. O’Leary said his coworkers checked on him consistently over that weekend to make sure he was OK.
“I’ve worked here over 18 years,” O’Leary said. “These are special people.”
One of those people is his dispatcher, Melanie Nelson. She said O’Leary is one of her most consistent and reliable drivers.
“He’s just a rocker,” Nelson said. “He really loves the kids, he loves the job, he loves what he’s doing.”
Nelson said O’Leary even asked to work overtime to help pay for a new pair of glasses, which were damaged in the accident. The glass traveled about halfway through the bus.
“It could have been far worse,” O’Leary said. “You talk about microseconds or fractions of a second, and a lot of things could have changed. I’d pick that hit all day long instead of those girls. That would have been absolutely devastating.”
Jenna Peterson: 425-339-3486; jenna.peterson@heraldnet.com; X: @jennarpetersonn.
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