The film ”Dying Young” had just flickered off the two television screens on the bus carrying the Notre Dame women`s swimming team as it moved through a heavy snowstorm on the Indiana Toll Road early Friday morning.
The 37 passengers, who had left Evanston just hours earlier after a meet at Northwestern, were enjoying pizza and Gatorade. They were only four miles from home.
Margaret ”Meghan” Beeler, who had attended St. Joseph High School across the road from the Notre Dame campus and is related to Irish football great John Lattner, had dozed off, her head leaning against the window in the last seat on the bus.
Another freshman, Colleen Hipp of St. Louis, was chatting with seatmates near the middle of the bus. When it began to veer to the right, some passengers thought they were exiting the toll road for home. But the subtle veer turned into an uncontrolled spin, and passengers near the front heard driver Howard E. Dixon, 53, call out, ”Hang on! Here we go!”
The bus careened off the snow-covered highway and flipped onto its roof in a ditch. Beeler and Hipp, both 19, were killed when they were thrown from the rolling bus and crushed beneath it. The vehicle had no seat belts.
”The whole inside of the bus kind of collapsed around us,” said Diane Walton, who was sitting next to Beeler. ”The bathroom fell on top of us. When we stopped, I looked for Margaret, or I looked where she was supposed to be, and she wasn`t there.”
Katey Andrew, 20, a Naperville resident who had traveled with the team as a timer, crawled through a bus window.
”I could see Colleen under the bus,” she said. ”All I could see was her head. I saw a truck driver who had stopped, and I remember saying, `We have to move this bus. We have to move this bus.` And he just looked at me.” Another freshman swimmer, Haley Scott, 18, of Phoenix, Ariz., was listed in serious condition after two surgeries for a spinal injury at Memorial Hospital in South Bend, according to a spokeswoman there. Teammates had tended to her on the scene.
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”She was crying, and she was saying she was cold,” said Andrew. ”So we put parkas around her, were careful not to move her, and tried to keep her calm.”
After being treated at area hospitals, 19 students were admitted Friday to the Notre Dame infirmary with injuries ranging from bruised kidneys to broken bones.
Dixon, who had become a friend and trusted driver over the seven years he transported the Notre Dame swim team, was treated and released from a local hospital.
Some motorists reported to police that the United Limo bus carrying the team had passed them on the snowy stretch of road, possibly going too fast in blinding, blowing conditions.
”Some witnesses said he was speeding,” said Sgt. Nora Werner of the Indiana State Police. But Dixon had not been ticketed Friday, and the accident was still being investigated.
Afterward, Dixon passed a blood-alcohol test, Werner said. It showed no trace of alcohol in his system, she said.
Dixon has a valid Indiana commercial driver`s license, officials in that state said. But his license was suspended for drunken driving from Sept. 18, 1987 to Dec. 16, 1987, officials confirmed to the Tribune Friday.
Following Dixon`s three-month license suspension for drunken driving, his license was suspended for three more months, through March 17, 1988, for
”failure to meet requirements,” Indiana records show. The designation refers to a technical violation such as failure to obtain insurance, Indiana officials said.
”Howard has been our driver for years,” said team member Becky Wood, a senior. ”He`s always been an excellent driver. When people die, you want to blame someone, but never did I blame Howard.”
The accident left others questioning why the team was even traveling along the toll road between Michigan City and South Bend, which had been hit hard by the lake-effect snow and high winds that often strike the area.
”I`m sure there will be some questions as to why they were on that road,” said Pete Bercich, a member of the Irish football team. ”But right now, we`re more worried about their friends and family who need our support.” Dixon could not be reached for comment Friday.
The accident brought the closely-knit Notre Dame community even more tightly together as members of the swim team, their friends and classmates sought to cope with the loss.
At a mass Friday evening, students and faculty overflowed the 1,400-seat Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Members of the swim team, some in slings and braces, wept and were reminded that, in their faith, death does not mean an end, it means a change.
”There`s such a feeling of unity here, and it`s hard to believe somebody could be taken from that,” said Amy Fleisher, 18, as she left the mass.
University President Rev. Edward Malloy rushed back from Washington to preside at the mass. The University Counseling Center met individually with team members and collectively during an afternoon meeting.
Varsity athletic events on the road and at home were canceled for the weekend, the first time for such action since the assassination of President Kennedy.
Swim coach Tim Welsh, who was aboard the bus, met with team members just before the service in a tear-filled session at the Rolfs Aquatic Center.
”It was a beautiful meeting,” he said. ”We needed to be back together as a group. We`re tired, we`re sad, and we`re fine, but we`re a group that believes that mental strength, mental power, imagination, prayer and work changes things.
”The girls last night were phenomenal in helping one another out of the bus. They were careful to keep one another clothed and warm. No one was ever left alone. It was just a beautiful strong supportive group of people.”
Beeler, who swam in three events at Northwestern, was a sprint and middle-distance performer. She made the Indiana all-state team all four years in high school, where she also was treasurer of a chapter of Amnesty International and volunteered regularly at a shelter for the homeless.
Gordon Beeler said of his daughter: ”She has been a gift to everyone who`s known her all her life. I am not sad for me or my family, just those whose lives she won`t be able to touch. She was brilliant. She would have been a great business person, mother, lawyer, or whatever. She was going to be a lawyer.”
”I knew her from around campus,” said quarterback Rick Mirer. ”She was a great person, and it`s sad to lose a friend.”
Hipp, swam in the 100-meter butterfly, and was a member of the U.S. swimming team in high school.
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”She is very intelligent, very likeable,” Doranne Hipp, 24, said of her sister. ”I`m really denying the whole thing . . . I feel like it`s just so unfair. She had so much ahead of her in life. She was a young woman ready to blossom into the new world. She was always very ambitious, yet caring and very disciplined.”