A Bus Driver Passed Out on a Steep Pittsburgh Hill. A Teen in a Fast-Food Uniform Grabbed the Wheel. Then She Saw His Badge
A Bus Driver Passed Out on a Steep Pittsburgh Hill. A Teen in a Fast-Food Uniform Grabbed the Wheel. Then She Saw His Ba. Here is what happened next.
If you’ve never been to Pittsburgh in January, it’s hard to explain the hills. Streets tilt so steeply that sidewalks turn into staircases. When it snows, the city salts the roads and prays.
On a dark Thursday evening around 6:30, Port Authority bus 54 was crawling up through the South Side Slopes and then over the top toward the long descent down to Carson Street. It was packed with people heading home: nurses in scrubs, a man with a cello case, a mother with two little boys, college kids with earbuds.
Seventeen-year-old Jasmine Carter sat near the middle in her red and black burger restaurant uniform, still smelling like fryer oil. She’d just finished a six-hour shift. She was scrolling on her phone, half asleep, thinking about the chemistry test she still had to study for and whether her dad would be home for dinner.
A passenger near the front had his phone out to film the snow coming down. That’s the only reason the video exists.
At the crest of the hill, the bus started down. Normal speed. Then the driver’s head dipped forward.
At first people thought he was checking something. Then his body slumped sideways against the wheel and his foot slid off the brake.
The bus lurched. It started picking up speed.
A woman in the front seat screamed. “Driver! DRIVER!”
“He’s out!” a man yelled. “He’s passed out!”
Now the bus was really moving. The snowy houses on both sides blurred. The engine whined. Up ahead, at the bottom of the hill, was a red light and a busy intersection full of cars.
Passengers grabbed poles. The mother pulled her boys into her lap. The man with the cello case was frozen in his seat, staring at the windshield.
Jasmine was already moving.
She didn’t think about it. She told reporters later she didn’t remember standing up. She just remembered being at the front of the bus, shoving past the farebox, and grabbing the steering wheel with both hands over the driver’s slumped shoulders.
“Somebody help me move him!” she shouted.
Two men pulled the driver back in his seat. Jasmine leaned across him and wrenched the wheel to keep the bus straight. Her eyes scanned the dashboard. She had taken this bus every day for two years. She’d watched drivers do it a thousand times. Next to the seat there was a big lever. The parking brake.
She grabbed it and pulled with everything she had.
The lever groaned. The bus shuddered.
And then, with a loud crack, the handle snapped clean off in her hand.
On the video you can hear the entire bus scream.
Jasmine looked at the broken handle in her fist for half a second. Then she threw it on the floor and grabbed the wheel again. The red light at the bottom was getting closer. Cars were crossing. She could see a woman in a crosswalk with a stroller.
On the right side of the street, the city plows had pushed up a huge, long bank of snow, five feet high, packed hard.
“HOLD ON!” Jasmine screamed.
She cranked the wheel to the right.
The bus swerved. The front right corner hit the snowbank with a deep, muffled crunch. Snow exploded across the windshield. Everyone lurched forward. The bus scraped along the bank for maybe forty feet, slower, slower, plowing a white wall ahead of it.
And then it stopped.
Completely still. Engine ticking. Snow sliding down the glass.
For three full seconds, nobody made a sound.
Then the whole bus erupted. Cheering. Crying. The cello man was clapping. The mother was kissing her boys’ heads over and over. Somebody started chanting, “Fast food girl! Fast food girl!”
Jasmine didn’t hear any of it. She was shaking so hard she had to hold onto the wheel to stand.
A nurse in scrubs pushed to the front and knelt next to the driver. She pressed two fingers to his neck.
“He’s breathing!” she called out. “He’s got a pulse! Somebody call 911!”
Jasmine looked down at the driver for the first time. His hat had fallen off. She hadn’t even looked at his face. She’d been staring at the road.
Then she saw the ID badge clipped to his jacket. The photo. The name.
She made a sound nobody on that bus will ever forget.
“That’s my dad,” she sobbed, falling to her knees beside him. “That’s my dad. He told me he quit driving.”
The nurse looked up at her, stunned.
And from the driver’s jacket pocket, half sticking out, was a folded piece of paper with a hospital logo on it.
What Happened Next
Paramedics arrived within minutes. Jasmine rode in the ambulance holding her father’s hand. His name was Marcus Carter, fifty-one, a Port Authority driver for twenty-three years.
The paper in his pocket was a letter from his cardiologist dated two months earlier. It said he had a serious heart rhythm problem and should not drive a commercial vehicle until he had a procedure. Marcus had told his family he’d quit. In truth, he had kept driving, picking up extra shifts, because the procedure cost more than his insurance would cover and he had been trying to save enough for Jasmine’s first year of college. He didn’t want her to know.
At the Hospital
Doctors said the episode on the bus was the exact thing the cardiologist had warned about. If it had happened at the top of the hill with nobody at the front of the bus, it could have killed him and many others. Marcus had his procedure two days later.
When he woke up, Jasmine was sitting next to his bed, still in her burger uniform. “You lied to me,” she said. He cried. “I wanted you to have more than I did,” he said. “I do,” she told him. “I have you.”
What the City Did
The Port Authority honored Jasmine at a city council meeting and put Marcus on paid medical leave. A local university read about her and offered her a full scholarship. Marcus is driving again now, with a clean bill of health. Every evening at 6:30, his daughter rides his route home.
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