It was a scene of pandemonium in the aftermath of a school bus crashing into a home at East Fifth Avenue and Albion Street on Wednesday afternoon.
“It was like a horror movie,” said Sarah Carrillo, 13, a passenger.
Kids on the bus were screaming, and people in the neighborhood were screaming and running to help.
Middle school students were jumping off the bus after it came to rest in the dining room of Tracey Lepine’s home on the northwest corner.
One of the students on the bus said a group of kids walking toward an RTD bus stop saw the wreck and rushed to help.
“A lot of kids saw us and helped,” Martin Ramirez, 14, said. “They were the ones to calm us down.”
Eight ambulances were called to the scene to take the injured to hospitals. Nineteen people, including 16 students, were transported by ambulance, officials said.
One of the injured was a man who collapsed while running to help, and another was a woman waiting in her car to pick up her child from Steck Elementary School, officials said.
“There were lots of students on backboards when I got here, and they looked like they were hurting,” said Denver Public Schools spokesman Mark Stevens.
The accident happened about 2:40 p.m. across the street from Steck, which doesn’t let out until 3 p.m.
Students at Steck said they heard the commotion about 20 minutes before school let out.
“I heard a loud crash like something exploding,” Gavin Green, 11, said.
After school dismissed, many Steck students and parents gathered outside the police tape and watched Hill Middle School students being taken away on stretchers, Green said.
Tonia Hunstad, a Steck parent, said the intersection of the accident is usually congested at that time of afternoon with children crossing the street and parents in cars picking up their kids.
“I can’t imagine what would have happened if the school was already out,” Hunstad said. “Nobody was out here yet, just a few parents walking up.”
Lepine was amazed when she got home after the crash.
“Bricks were everywhere,” Lepine said. “It looked like total debris. I couldn’t see my furniture.”
The bricks swallowed a buffet table and a dining-room table that Lepine called her two young children’s “homework table.”
“Thank God they weren’t home yet,” Lepine said. “It happened just minutes before Steck was getting out.”
Her children, Sara Froch, 6, and Jacob Froch, 5, attend Steck.
Lepine couldn’t believe it when she got a call during a meeting at Builder MT in Lakewood saying that a bus had run into her house.
“I just ran out in shock,” Le pine said.
