Nestor Ramos • Staff writer • August 13, 2009
Accident investigators are trying to determine what caused a Honeoye teenager’s car to veer into an oncoming school bus, killing her and injuring several aboard the bus Wednesday.
Courtney Rook, 19, died when the 1998 Ford Contour she was driving crossed into the oncoming traffic lane on Gulick Road in South Bristol and collided with a school bus. Rook, a student at State University College at Potsdam, was on her way to the dentist.
Seven children and the bus’s driver went to area hospitals with minor injuries. The bus carrying Canandaigua YMCA summer campers was about one mile from Cumming Nature Center for a weekly field trip.
Results of drug and alcohol tests on Rook and tests of her car’s mechanical systems are still pending today, Ontario County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. David Frasca said. He said drugs and alcohol do not appear to have been a factor in the crash.
“We’re leaning toward driver inattention, just because there were no brake marks,” Frasca said. Investigators are researching cell phone records to try to determine whether Rook was making a call or text messaging at the time of the crash.
The road where the crash occurred has a slight curve, but “she could have seen the bus in the other lane,” Frasca said.
Even so, the car never slowed before colliding head on with the bus, which did brake to about 40 mph. Bus driver Jodi Uhrig estimated the speed of Rook’s car at about 60 mph, Frasca said. The speed limit in the area is 55 mph.
Ontario County Sheriff’s Deputy Bill Martin said it appeared that Rook died instantly.
Most of the campers who had been on the bus returned to camp Thursday, Canandaigua YMCA CEO Laura O’Shaughnessy said.
“One of them couldn’t get to the playground fast enough. That’s the great thing about being a kid. They’re very resilient.”
Most of the children injured in the accident had been older, O’Shaughnessy said, because the impact was felt the worst toward the back of the bus, where older campers sit.
O’Shaughnessy said crisis counselors and a Canandaigua School District psychologist were at the YMCA Thursday talking to children and staff.
The camp’s weekly field trips will continue as scheduled, she said.
The camp enrollment fluctuates between 40 and 55 over the course of the summer, O’Shaughnessy said, and no parents have removed their children because of the accident.
“Parents are very pleased with how everything was handled.”
Those who knew Rook remembered her as being well-liked in the community. Craig Emmerling, for whom Rook worked for several years as a lifeguard at Sandy Bottom Beach Park on Honeoye Lake, said he’d seen Rook just days earlier.
“Everybody was Courtney’s friend,” Emmerling said. His own son, Charles, had also been a lifeguard and had known Rook for most of his life. “She was so fun to be around. She had endless energy and compassion toward everybody,” Craig Emmerling said.
“She was a wonderful person,” said Lynn Emmerling, Craig Emmerling’s wife, who said Rook was studying education. “She was an excellent worker.”
Honeoye Central classmate Corey Checho said that with a graduating class of 80 or 90, everyone at the high school was close.
The children on the bus were YMCA summer campers, according to a statement released by Canandaigua YMCA CEO Laurie O’Shaughnessy.
The YMCA, she said in the statement, “is saddened by this incident and sends its sympathy to the family of the other driver.”
YMCA staff members and hospital personnel met students at the hospitals to offer support. Counselors will be on hand again today at the YMCA to assist children involved in the accident.
Melissa Anderson, environmental educator at the Cumming Nature Center, referred questions about the accident to police.
The bus had not arrived at the center, Anderson said, and declined to provide any details about why the children were coming to the center.
Located 40 miles south of Rochester, the center’s 900-acre preserve is a popular hiking destination. It is owned by the Rochester Museum & Science Center.
Various groups visit the nature center on a daily basis, particularly in summer, said Debra Jacobson, director of marketing and community affairs for the Rochester Museum & Science Center.
“We are saddened,” Jacobson said.
She added that she had little information about the crash because the accident occurred before the bus reached the museum’s property. Jacobson said no nature center or museum personnel were present at the accident scene.
VFREILE@DemocratandChronicle.com
NRAMOS@DemocratandChronicle.com
Includes reporting by staff writers Ashwin Verghese, Mitch Pritchard and Jeffrey Blackwell, and Brady Dillsworth.