By Adam Nichols and Gabriela Resto Montero
DNAinfo Staff
CHINATOWN —Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited Sunday with survivors of an horrific bus crash that left 14 dead and 19 injured early Saturday.
The bus, operated by Brooklyn-based company World Wide Tours, had been headed to Chinatown when it flipped on a Bronx highway early Saturday, skidded 250 yards and smashed into a traffic sign that sheared off its roof.
Many of the passengers were of Chinese descent and have not yet been identified. Bloomberg asked that anyone who knew passengers step forward to make sure their families can be notified.
"Let's pray for all the victims," Bloomberg said Sunday. "They're getting the best medical care and a lot of this is now in the hands of God."
Survivors were taken to the Jacobi Medical Center and St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx. City officials said there were 32 passengers on board the bus.
Officials said the accident may have been caused by a hit-and-run driver. The bus had been returning to the city from the Mohegan Sun casino when the accident happened on the New England Thruway at 5.35 a.m.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said police were looking for a truck which may have struck the back of the bus. The truck didn't stop, he said.
But investigators said so far they had seen no indication that the bus had been hit by another vehicle.
The driver, Orphadell Williams, survived. His wife, Holly, told the Daily News he was wracked with guilt.
He "feels like he's at fault," she said.
"I told him it's not his fault — it's an accident. He feels upset that a lot of people died on his bus."
First responder Captain James Ellson described to the New York Times the hell he found at the scene.
"It was a pile of humans, either still in their seats or on the floor, wrapped in the metal, wrapped in the wreckage," he sad.
"They were in the full length of the bus, from the front to the rear there were bodies. It was just a pile."
Passengers told of a grim scene after the crash, including seeing victims who had their limbs torn off and survivors trapped underneath other passengers who had died.
"The rest were dead or screaming for help," Jose Hernandez, a survivor, told the News. "We tried to help people but there was a lot of twisted metal in the way."
World Wide Tours was recently cited for fatigued drivers by federal authorities, the Times reported. The company had two accidents resulting in injured customers in the past two years, the paper reported.
The driver made the overnight trip between Connecticut and the Lower East Side five times a week, the News reported.
The owners of the bus company issued a statement expressing their grief over the accident and saying that they were cooperating fully with authorities.
