Tragedy In The Poconos: Calm, Excitement, Then A Crash

It was early in the morning on a Wednesday, June 3, when Alfredo Telemaco revved up the engine of his Academy Bus, full of Italian tourists and heading from New York to the legendary cliffs and clouds of mist at Niagara Falls.

The morning was bright, any hints of Monday rain and Tuesday clouds now vanished, and flecks of sun blinked golden dots between the thick branches of roadside trees. A perfect day and a perfect week, it seemed, were ahead.

Then tragedy struck.

As morning grew and the sun continued to rise, the bus cruised past Jersey City and Newark and out into the leafy suburbia of New Jersey. Each new town was an unscoped world to the foreigner’s eye.

The direct route would have taken the bus through Morris County, then a turn north through the Delaware Water Gap, where the woods grow thicker and greener. Sloping hills along the riverbank of the Delaware had to evoke the pastoral scenes in their native Italy’s Province of Vicenza.

As the bus moved north, a tractor-trailer traveling in the opposite direction, and plenty fast, drove off the road, across the grassy median and head-on into the bus full of tourists who just moments earlier were snug in their thick-cushioned seats.

The impact of the crash was so loud, people in houses near the highway could hear it.

Then, “all of a sudden people were screaming,” Johnny Walsh, who lives near the highway, told the Associated Press.

The noise, the screaming, the injured taken to the hospital and the three three dead in the bus would make for one of the worst accidents in memory on this usually quiet stretch of highway,

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Mystery envelopes the story of Franklin Wyatt, the driver of the tractor-trailer.

He was a long way from his Oklahoma home on this morning as he swept along Pennsylvania roads and its rest stops that seemed larger than many towns in his home state.

The 55-year-old from Macomb was driving the truck for Great Wide Dedicated Transport. Unknown is how long he had been driving as the morning’s 10 o’clock hour approached. Nor is it known yet where he was going, or even where he was coming from.

At that hour, Wyatt would have been driving toward the sun, which slowly progressed to its height in the sky above him as made his way through the Pocono Mountains, descending I-380.

***

Interstate-380 in Pennsylvania’s Coolbaugh Township is a four-lane highway, two lanes heading in each direction, with a wide, grassy median separating the vehicles heading northwest.

At mid-morning on this day the temperature was in the 60s and it was sunny and getting warmer.

***

At about 10 a.m., something caused Wyatt’s tractor trailer to slip off the highway.

Thousands of pounds of truck careened down into the median and shot quickly up the slope, presenting the back of its cab to oncoming traffic.

Alfredo Telemaco, a man with 10 years experience driving, a man whose family told media that he “lived” for his passengers, had no time to swerve out of the way.

When the truck hit the front of the bus, he was killed instantly. The truck’s trailer was sheared clean in two pieces. Parts of the the truck flew across the road and lay on their side in the ditch in the woods.

Bus passenger Rino Guerra, 69 was also killed.

So was Marco Fornasetti, 29, who had come to America for his honeymoon. His young wife was one of more than a dozen who was injured.

Wyatt escaped with minor injuries.

Oncoming traffic skidded to a stop as wreckage was strewn across both lanes, in the median, into the trees. Eyewitness reports to local media describe passengers bursting out of cars and sprinting toward the bus.

A dozen passengers were still trapped inside, and it would be three hours until the last person was freed.

***

The Pennsylvania State Police arrived to investigate the cause of the crash that left three dead and 15 injured. Others could only pray.

“Our hearts and prayers go out to the many victims of the tragic bus accident that occurred today in Monroe County. ... God be with them,” Bishop Joseph C. Bambera of the Diocese of Scranton posted on Twitter.

Officials are still gathering information on Wyatt because much of the information in the truck was either destroyed or damaged in the crash.

“This was a terrible accident, and there are no words that can do justice to the sorrow we feel,” Great Wide Dedicated Transport said in a statement. “We are committed to learning the facts and are cooperating fully with the authorities.”

Days later, the scene at the accident is largely restored.

The road has been repaired and cleared. The view from I-380, dominated by Mt. Pocono, is still beautiful.

Scars still line the roadside trees, though, where the cab of the truck landed after hitting the tourist bus and ending a trip to America with the crash.