2006 Lee High School Bus Crash
Near Huntsville, Alabama
On the morning of November twentieth, two thousand six, a school bus carrying about forty Lee High School students was crossing the overpass here above Church Street, on Interstate Five Sixty Five. A car driven by another Lee High student swerved to pass the bus and began to fishtail. The bus struck it, slid across the concrete barrier for roughly a hundred feet, and tipped nose first off the overpass to the gravel below.
Four young women died. Christine Collier, Nicole Ford, and Tanesha Hill were killed at the scene, and Crystal McCrary died the next day. About thirty three other students were injured.
It remains one of the deadliest school transportation accidents in Alabama history, and it pushed Huntsville and the state to look hard at bus safety. A memorial later honored the four students lost here, on an ordinary stretch of highway that a whole community will never see the same way again.
