RTD officials Tuesday reinforced to bus drivers the message that safety is the agency’s No. 1 priority in the wake of two accidents in three days that left three people dead and several others injured.
As drivers prepared to pull out of bus garages to begin their routes throughout the day, supervisors and managers “reminded them of the safety procedures they have been trained on,” said Regional Transportation District spokesman Scott Reed.
On Saturday, a bus operated by 30-year-old Tideneykiyalesh Hawari yat of Aurora, a driver for Veolia Transportation, a private provider of transit service for RTD, ran through a red light in Denver, according to witnesses, killing two people and injuring at least a dozen more.
Lt. Matt Murray, a Denver police spokesman, said Tuesday evening that Hawariyat has been charged with 11 counts of careless driving resulting in serious bodily injury and two counts of careless driving resulting in death.
All of the charges are misdemeanors, so she won’t be arrested, Murray said.
In a separate incident Monday evening in Aurora, a 78-year-old man died after apparently being hit by a bus operated by an RTD driver as it pulled away from a stop at the intersection of South Peoria Street and East Mississippi Avenue.
Reed said the accidents are “completely unrelated.”
“One allegedly was running a red light. The most recent was a fluke accident with a pedestrian,” he said.
Aurora police have found no eyewitnesses to Monday’s accident involving RTD’s 121 Limited bus.
A woman who was sitting in the bus shelter saw the man on the sidewalk as the bus pulled up.
“She looked away and turned back when the bus left and saw him laying in the roadway,” Aurora police Lt. Charles DeShazer said Tuesday.
Police contacted RTD after witnesses called 911 and told dispatchers that a bus may have hit someone.
RTD reached the driver of the 60-foot-long accordion- style bus 19 blocks from the scene, and he pulled over. Police then questioned people on board.
Passengers and the driver didn’t realize the man had been hit, DeShazer said.
Police are looking for clues on video from an internal security camera, hoping it may have recorded the victim through side windows as the bus passed him, Reed said.
Only RTD buses that ply the 16th Street Mall and those operated by contract drivers have forward-pointing “drive cams,” Reed said.
Because the victim apparently was hit by the rear right tires of the bus, a drive cam would not have recorded the accident, he added. The man, who lived at an apartment in Aurora, won’t be identified until his next of kin can be notified, said Arapahoe County coroner Michael Dobersen.
The victim could have slipped from the curb or collapsed into the path of the bus, DeShazer said.
The driver, who hasn’t been identified, has worked for RTD for two years and has a clean driving record. RTD has placed the driver on suspension pending the outcome of the investigation.
He is cooperating with police and is upset about the accident, DeShazer said.
In addition to the video, DeShazer said, investigators will review autopsy reports, including the victim’s toxicology results, blood results from the driver, and all physical evidence before reaching any conclusions
“We are going to slow everything down and be very methodical and make sure we come to the right conclusion.”
The intersection is busy in the late afternoon, as five lanes of traffic buzz past within about a foot of the curb, and horns toot at drivers who turn quickly into shopping plazas on each corner.
Tuesday, a dozen bus riders a half hour before and after the time of Monday’s collision said they didn’t know anything about it.
Standing inches from where orange paint marked the spot of the fatal impact just off the curb, Jessica Marquardt, 61, said she didn’t know the man who was killed there exactly 24 hours earlier.
She has caught a bus home from work at the stop each Tuesday through Saturday for three years, she said.
“There’s a lot of places to shop, but not a lot of places to live here, so it could have been anybody,” she said.
Staff writer Joey Bunch contributed to this report.
