WRTA driver suspended after crash
Two vehicles struck; Austintown police investigates
AUSTINTOWN — A WRTA driver is suspended and may face criminal charges and lose her job after the bus she was driving damaged some vehicles.
The driver has not been named, but the Austintown police report suggests she was likely intoxicated while driving the bus in the neighborhood of Marcia Drive on Tuesday afternoon.
WRTA Executive Director Dean Harris said the driver is off work while the company awaits the final results from a drug screening done immediately after police responded to the crash near Mahoning Avenue, as well as the police department’s final determination on whether to charge her with OVI.
If charged, the woman will likely lose her commercial driver’s license. If she is not charged, she still would have to go through a substance abuse program before returning to work, Harris said.
“How the charges work I don’t know, but more than likely she won’t be able to work for us if she is charged and convicted of OVI,” he said. “So we won’t bring her back until those things are addressed, if we bring her back at all.”
The police report states that Austintown police responded to Marcia Drive near Mahoning Avenue about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, after the bus crashed into a pickup truck. Another vehicle also was reportedly damaged by the bus, on Inglewood Avenue, which is one street over.
The report states that the driver was sitting in the back of a WRTA sedan when police arrived and allegedly admitted to hitting the truck and driving too fast but denied having consumed any alcohol.
A WRTA official told police that the company would provide both GPS data and video recording evidence to the department. The owner of the car damaged on Inglewood Avenue also found video evidence of the bus hitting his car, which was captured by his doorbell camera. The driver likely will be charged with hit-skip for that incident, the report states.
The report also states that police later learned the driver had been transported to a drug testing facility, where she tested positive twice for alcohol, first registering a .114 on a breath test, then registering a .116. The legal limit for driving in Ohio is .08.
She was taken to a Mercy Health facility, where police tried to explain some details of the investigation to her and get her to sign forms, but the doctor there told them “she was not of sound mind or judgment to be questioned.”
The report states that workers at the testing facility who interacted with the driver told police she was incoherent, kept falling asleep, could not speak coherently and could not follow instructions or sign paperwork.
Harris said the driver has not caused any problems or been subject to any discipline before now.
“None recently that I’m aware of,” he said. “She’s a long-term driver and has been relatively good up until now. We have a lot of rules, (but she has done) nothing would’ve been serious. I haven’t even heard her name until yesterday.”
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