CHICAGO — Police slapped the driver of the accordion-style CTA bus that ran a red light and killed a woman on Michigan Avenue with tickets for failure to stop at a red light and failure to exercise due caution.
The Tuesday evening crash at Lake and Michigan killed Aimee Coath, 51, of south suburban Flossmoor, officials said.
Coath is the mother of a son and daughter, both adults. She grew up in Lake Forest and was a 1986 graduate of Knox College in Galesburg. She was involved in theater and was a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority, friends said.
She was at the busy Downtown intersection around 5:45 p.m. Tuesday when the No. 148 bus, an extended articulated bus, ran the red light, and hit two people and several cars. Coath was pinned under the bus and killed.
The driver of the bus, a 48-year-old man, was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was treated for non-life-threatening head injuries, authorities said.
Witnesses said the bus was trying to avoid another car when it veered off Michigan Avenue and plowed into the pedestrians on the northeast corner of Michigan and Lake, just outside the Illinois Center's plaza.
Kyla Gardner describes the scene shortly after the crash:
Screams filled the street as bystanders tried desperately to pull people from under the accordion-style bus. When firefighters arrived, they crawled under the bus looking for victims.
Eight other people were taken to area hospitals with non-life threatening injuries, said officer Janel Sedevic, a Chicago Police spokeswoman.
Four or five cars were involved in the crash, including one that ended up with a wheel bent awkwardly off its axle.
The bus was empty at the time, said Larry Langford, spokesman for the Chicago Fire Department.
Most of the people who were injured were in those cars, Langford said.
Hector Vega and his 4-year-old daughter, Ren, were in their car parked along Lake Street watching the bucket boys drum when the bus came crashing into their car.
"She was watching and got out of her car seat, and she's impatient because she's 4," the Medical District resident said. "I go, 'OK, go ahead.' She was standing right next to my seat, so luckily she wasn’t sitting down, otherwise she would have bounced right through. She was only inches away from the seat, it was soft."
Ren was hospitalized after hitting her head on the seat in front of her, Vega said.
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