Jill Bien was headed back to Norridge after a lousy day at a Wisconsin casino when her luck began to change. For the better, though it didn’t seem so at first.
As her coach bus neared Kenosha, the driver collapsed onto the floor and the bus scraped against a wall and bounced back into traffic on Interstate 94 on Saturday evening.
“I’m yelling at him to stop the bus, and I realized we started going against the wall again,” Bien told WISN-TV in Milwaukee. “I turned to yell at him, ‘Like what are you doing?’ and there was no one sitting there.”
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Bien said she was so shocked she didn’t see the driver on the floor.
“All that went through my mind was I can’t believe the seat was empty,” Bien told TMJ-TV, another station in Milwaukee. “I couldn’t process where he had gone to.
“I didn’t have a chance to stand up and ask anybody if they knew how to drive a bus and could get up here,” Bien said. “People were being tossed around.”
So she hopped into the seat, grabbed the wheel and hit the brakes.
“As I was trying to steer it straight and come to a stop along the shoulder, I noticed our driver was out cold down in the stairwell,” she said.
Bien was able to pull the bus over and safely stop it. The driver was taken in fair condition to a hospital, and 11 passengers on board were treated for minor injuries, according to police.
The bus was carrying 34 passengers from the Potawatomi casino in Milwaukee and was traveling about 60 mph at the time, according to Kenosha County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dan Ruth.
“There was a potential for a more catastrophic incident,” he said. “There were no other cars involved, thank goodness.”
Bien said there were long seconds when she didn’t know how things would turn out.
“Your life flashes before your eyes,” she told TMJ. “My kids came into my eyes, and I just said, ‘I gotta live tonight.’ I wanted everybody to be safe and I wanted to make myself safe. So that’s all I could try to do.”