UTTER PAIN: At the bus driver’s trial, Siu Ying Ng (left) and Siu Yung Ng yesterday recount their harrowing ride. (Robert Kalfus)
Survivors of a horrific Bronx bus crash that killed 15 people returning to Chinatown from Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun casino told jurors yesterday their motor coach swayed wildly before it tipped over and its roof was sliced off by a sign post.
“The bus wasn’t steady. It was going from one side to the other,” Siu Ying Ng, 63, recounted at the manslaughter trial of driver Ophadell Williams.
Bronx prosecutors say Williams, 41, is criminally culpable for the March 2011 tragedy because he failed to get enough sleep before he got behind the wheel of the World Wide Tours bus.
Ng was sitting in the middle of the swaying bus on the driver’s side when it suddenly tipped sideways onto a guardrail and skidded into the signpost on I-95.
“The bus struck something in an accident,” Ng recounted. “Then I fainted. I lost consciousness.”
“I’m sitting there and I’m scared, I’m scared,” said another witness, 73-year-old Siu Yung Ng.
“I heard a lot of yelling, a lot of noises. People suffer. I lost conscious.”
Both of the women, who are not related, said through a Cantonese translator that the accident left them unable to work.
Siu Yung Ng said she used to work seven days a week as a home health aide. She underwent nine surgeries after the accident and now uses a wheelchair.
“The pain is absolutely excruciating. I just want to die,” she said.
“I can’t walk. How could I work? … I lost everything. I’m not working. I cannot make a living.”
Siu Ying Ng said she spent four months in a hospital recovering from her injuries.
“Sometimes I feel a lot of pain . . . I have to use a cane,” she said. “I feel very uncomfortable. I cannot work.”
Defense lawyer Patrick Bruno said prosecutors put the women on the witness stand more to sway jurors’ emotions against Williams than to present new facts about the crash.
“They have to be making things sound as terrible as they can,” he said. “And they have to attribute everything to my client’s reckless driving.”
Other injured passengers are expected to testify when the trial resumes next week.
The DA says one survivor lost his arms when he raised them to protect his head.
Testimony is also expected from motorists who saw the bus meandering from lane to lane as it headed down I-95.