Bluffton, Ohio – Players on Bluffton University’s baseball team and their parents returned home Sunday, two days after a bus plunged off a roadway in Georgia and claimed the lives of four of their teammates and two others.
The father of deceased player David Betts wore the baseball cap his son had on the morning of the crash when he stepped off a charter flight at Toledo Express Airport. Since the accident, he said, he has spent a lot of time telling the players who came away with only minor injuries that “it was OK that they survived.”
“He died doing what he loved and (with) who he enjoyed being with,” Jon Betts said. “That’s all that is important to us.”
About 30 people walked off the plane – one player limping, another with his arm in a sling – and greeted those waiting on the tarmac with hugs. A hearse drove to the back of the plane to transport two players’ bodies.
Also killed in Friday’s crash were sophomore outfielder Tyler Williams; Scott Harmon, a freshman; and Cody Holp, a freshman. The driver and his wife, Jerome and Jean Niemeyer, also died.
The team from the Mennonite-affiliated university was traveling to its annual spring training in Florida when the charter bus crashed before daybreak.
Investigators said the driver apparently mistook an exit ramp for a regular lane, and the bus crashed into a barrier at a T-shaped intersection and plummeted off the overpass onto the highway below.
