CHP Impounds Bus in Offramp Crash

SHERMAN OAKS â€”  The California Highway Patrol has impounded a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus that careened off a San Diego Freeway exit ramp over the weekend, injuring 28 people, authorities said Sunday.

Investigators will try to determine whether the brakes on the bus failed as well as whether the driver miscalculated the appropriate speed for negotiating the exit ramp.

No one was seriously injured, authorities said.

Ed Scannell, an MTA spokesman, said additional details about the crash would be unavailable until at least Tuesday because CHP investigators would not be working during Martin Luther King Day.

“We’d certainly like the CHP to do their inspection as quickly as they can,� Scannell said.

The bus, No. 561, was northbound on the San Diego Freeway, attempting to exit onto Ventura Boulevard, when the accident occurred about 5 p.m. Saturday.

The bus, whose route runs from near Los Angeles International Airport to Sylmar, had just stopped at the Getty Center.

Twenty-eight people were taken to area hospitals for neck and back injuries that ranged from minor to moderate, authorities said.

Some passengers told investigators that the driver, Dominique Mix-Lawton, 25, was frantically pumping the brakes before the bus hit a car and then slammed into a palm tree off the freeway exit ramp.

CHP officers said at the scene that there was no indication that drugs or alcohol were a factor in the crash.

One MTA official praised Mix-Lawton’s actions on Saturday, saying the driver made a split-second decision to steer the bus off the exit ramp and into a tree, rather than into several cars in her path.

Goldy Norton, a spokesman for the county bus drivers union, declined to comment on the crash while it remained under investigation.