Remembering the Oak Hill Bus Crash 15 Years Later

NEWTON, MA - As it has every April 27 for the past 15 years, the Newton community converged on the memorial at Oak Hill Middle School to remember Greg Chan, Steve Glidden, Melissa Leung and Kayla Rosenberg.

In 2001 the four Oak Hill middle schoolers were among 42 students and six adult chaperones traveling through Canada on a school music trip when their tour bus swerved off the road in Sussex, New Brunswick, flipping over several times before landing on its side in a ditch.

Fifteen years later the anniversary of the crash still dredges up painful memories - not just for the victims' families, or their friends, who are now in their late 20s, but for the community as a whole.

Thomas Farragher, who covered the tragedy 15 years ago, reconnected with Kayla Rosenberg's mother in a beautifully written piece in the Boston Globe earlier this month.

I asked Donna Rosenberg if she has allowed herself to imagine Kayla as a young woman. She would have turned 28 years old on Wednesday.

When she thinks of Kayla, what does she see? “I see all the things that she did — that she crammed into her short life. I see how kind she was to others.’’

When I interviewed Donna Rosenberg in 2001, she told me something that’s never left me. Within hours after the crash, 50 of Kayla’s friends arrived at the Rosenberg home to offer comfort. Kayla’s mom had a request. She wanted to take their picture. She wanted to remember them. And she wanted them to remember Kayla.

Click here to read Farragher's full story in the Boston Globe.

And Tom Mountain, a 30-year resident of Newton, wrote a moving piece in the TAB Wednesday about the nagging questions that still remain about the crash a decade and a half later.

Referring to Oak Hill administrators, Mountain wrote,

It’s reasonable to assume that they have at times been afflicted by that most cursed phrase in the English language, “What if?”

What if they had never authorized the Oak Hill Band to go to Canada in the first place? Wasn’t it too far, too time consuming, too complicated to go from one country to another? Wasn’t there another way for the children to get to Canada?

Mountain concluded his story by remarking on the circumstances surrounding the crash; he questioned how a bus driving on a dry road, when the weather was clear and no other vehicles or animals were in sight, could suddenly veer off the road.

"What we do know is that four Newton children died, and over 30 more were injured, in a bus crash that was entirely avoidable," Mountain writes at the conclusion of his story. "And what we also know is that four families, along with the now adult child-survivors of the crash, are still grieving some 15 years later."

Read Mountain's full story in the Newton TAB here.

The annual memorial service was held at 6 p.m. Wednesday night.

Photo courtesy of Christine Dunne via Flickr