Published: February 25, 2008 11:53 pm      

Settlement in bus wreck near

Almost eight years after a Murray County school bus was struck by a train near Tennga, some of the families of those hurt or killed in the collision are closer to reaching a settlement with Murray County Schools’ insurance company.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy ordered $343,783.03 to be released from a trust set up in 2001. The order was filed in District Court in Rome.

“Basically, we paid in all our insurance money early in the lawsuit and told the court to divide it as you see fit,” said Dean Donehoo, director of administrative services for Murray County Schools.

Amber Pritchett, 9; Daniel Pack, 9; and Kayla Silvers, 6, died from injuries from the collision of the school bus and a CSX train on March 28, 2000, on Liberty Church Road in Polk County, Tenn., near the Georgia state line. Jordan Manis, then 6, Brittany Gaddis, then 8, and Kevin Sherrill, then 8, also students at Northwest Elementary School, were injured. Rhonda Cloer, the driver of the bus, and her daughter, Kayli, who was 5 at the time, were also injured.

In 2006, a Tennessee judge restricted the amount of damages the families could receive to $300,000, the limit of the liability insurance the school system had under its insurance policy. The account accumulated $43,783.03 in interest. The cases were eventually moved to the federal court in Rome.

According to the order, the money is expected to be distributed:

• $100,000 to the family of Amber Pritchett

• $100,000 to the family of Kevin Sherrill

• $100,000 for the claims of Kendrick Perry, the train’s conductor

• $14,594 each for the claims of Brittany Gaddis, Jordan Manis and Roger Farley, the train’s engineer

Greg Melton, the attorney for State Farm Insurance, the school system’s insurance company, did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.

An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board determined that Cloer did not stop the bus before the train crossing to look and listen for an oncoming train as required by law in both Tennessee and Georgia. Cloer pleaded guilty to three counts of criminally negligent homicide. She served 90 days in jail and was placed on probation for four years. The probation expires on April 26 of this year, according to the Tennessee Department of Corrections Web site.

The NTSB report found the school system was “lax in safeguarding its students and contributed to the accident” by not evaluating drivers and failing to identify “improper behavior” and correcting such behavior. The school system disputed those findings.

The collision has made Murray County “more sensitive than most systems when it comes to bus safety,” Donehoo said this week. The school system has focused on training drivers in key areas such as railroad crossing safety and is continually looking at new technology to improve safety, he said.

“It continually stays in our minds,” Donehoo said of the collision. “It was a terrible thing for the families, the children and the school system to go through.”

Family members did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Lawsuits filed by some families in federal court in Chattanooga were initially dismissed but were settled after the families appealed. Those lawsuits claimed negligence against CSX, alleging inadequate signals at the crossing and excessive speed of the train, and negligence against Asplundh Tree Expert Co., alleging that excessive vegetation obstructed Cloer’s ability to see the train. Family members said then they couldn’t comment on the terms of that settlement.