Her parents were given a grief test by consultants, to measure their sadness against the Beck Hopelessness Scale and the Beck Depression Inventory (true or false: "There seems to be a lump in my throat much of the time"). Shannon was transformed into a lost-earnings projection of $107,421.57 per year, plus fringe benefits. The contest between the two visions of the crash, passionate and passionless, is beautifully observed, a chilling accomplishment of this book. They insisted on the emotional and legal safety of abstractions. They went to court to confront the men who built that bus, who ordered that delay, confident that once they realized what they had done, they would order all such buses off the road as quickly as possible.īut Ford's executives had a different way of seeing. Had that cage been in place, their daughter might not have been reduced to a slab of hardened blood and scorched teeth on a school bus floor. To Shannon's parents, Ford's delay was a personal, murderous act. Holes were drilled in the frame of Shannon's bus to attach the cage, but it was not installed because that particular bus frame was manufactured nine days before the law went into effect. A Federal safety law had required that Ford put a protective cage over its school bus gas tanks starting April 1, 1977. The Fairs and their lawyers discovered that when Ford built the chassis of the very bus that carried Shannon to her death, the company knew its design was not safe. His book "Reckless Disregard: Corporate Greed, Government Indifference, and the Kentucky School Bus Crash" weaves together three tales: the story of the crash, the story of the bus and, most compelling, the story of Shannon's parents, who suspected that the unsafe bus, not the drunken driver, killed their daughter. Kunen, known for his wry profile of the 1968 student protests at Columbia College, "The Strawberry Statement," covered the accident for People magazine. Twenty-three other children and three adults died with her. Shannon Fair, a sleepy 14-year-old coming home from a church outing, tried to get from the second row to the one emergency exit at the rear of the bus. The flames flashed through the floorboards, blocked escape, then danced from one highly flammable polyurethane seat to another within minutes, the temperature inside the bus hit 2,000 degrees. That tank, located on the outside of the bus's underlying frame next to the main and only entrance, caught fire immediately. But seconds later, a piece of loose metal punctured the school bus's gas tank. ONE night in May 1988 in central Kentucky, Larry Mahoney was heading home in his pickup, so drunk he didn't know he was on the wrong side of the road, when he collided head on with a school bus carrying 67 passengers. RECKLESS DISREGARD Corporate Greed, Government Indifference, and the Kentucky School Bus Crash.
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