Farmingdale High bus tragedy: Painful memories for survivors of past crashes

A bus carrying Long Island children crashed far from home, with some passengers killed and others hurt. Panicked parents rushed to hospitals. A community grieved.

The Sept. 21 crash of a charter bus carrying members of the Farmingdale High School marching band echoed three charter bus crashes that occurred decades ago. In 1968, it was children from Syosset; in 1970, from Lawrence; and in 1992, from East Meadow. 

For some who experienced those crashes as passengers or parents, the latest felt like the worst kind of lottery.     

“I was in disbelief," said Ann Marie Capozzi, who lost her 13-year-old son, Michael, in the April 11, 1992, crash.

"I could never imagine that this could possibly happen again to a school district in Nassau County or on Long Island, for that matter,” Capozzi said.

Michael was among 27 students from Woodland Middle School in East Meadow returning from a foreign language field trip to Montreal when their motor coach slid off a slushy Interstate 87 north of Albany.

On July 15, 1970, seven children died and 52 people were injured when a bus chartered by the Hillel School in Lawrence for a tour of Amish country and Hersheypark in Pennsylvania skidded off the road near Allentown.

Three Syosset High School band members were killed and 14 injured in an Aug. 31, 1968, crash on the New York State Thruway of a bus carrying students home from a Syracuse University band workshop.

Lingering effects

Survivors of those earlier crashes interviewed for this story said they went on to lead rich, fulfilling lives, but also spoke of lingering effects, including anxiety and panic attacks. 

Capozzi lives with loss. She thinks of Michael “every day.” She and her husband keep their son's name alive with $1,000 scholarships awarded each year to local student-athletes. 

Her advice for the Farmingdale survivors: “The only thing I could possibly say is you have to try and put one foot in front of the other."

"People say, ‘How do you go on?’ I had two other little children. I just had to get my head together,” Capozzi said.

The Farmingdale High band students were heading to a band camp in Greeley, Pennsylvania, when their rented charter bus crashed on I-84 in Wawayanda, in upstate Orange County. The vehicle “penetrated a cable barrier” and tumbled down an embankment, according to a preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board. Three adults — marching band director Gina Pellettiere, 43, longtime chaperone Beatrice Ferrari, 77, and the driver — were ejected from the motor coach. Pellettiere and Ferrari died. 

Those details echo some elements of the Lawrence crash, for which the NTSB published a full report in 1971. In that crash, the motor coach careened through a cable guardrail before tumbling down an embankment. Passengers also were ejected. The report concluded that the “ineffective” guardrail was a factor in the injuries and deaths, along with the absence of seat belts, in some cases.

Newsday has reported that the motor coach in the Farmingdale crash was equipped with seat belts. A notice of claim filed against the school district this month by the family of a student on board the bus alleged that seat belt use was not required. No state or federal law requires seat belt use on motor coaches, as there has been for cars and trucks since 1984, and for air travel since 1971. A bill in the state Legislature would require school bus passengers to use seat belts.

Charter buses carrying Long Island children also crashed in 2018 and 1974, though Newsday did not report any resulting deaths. 

Safe transportation

Federal regulators say bus travel is among the safest modes of transportation, with 35,000 motor coaches carrying 700 million passengers a year. But when crashes do happen, the results can be dire. From 2000 to 2020, an average of 246 buses were involved in fatal accidents, resulting in 284 deaths and 25,714 injuries each year, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation. 

Some survivors of the Syosset crash have agreed to serve as resources for a Facebook group, intended to link survivors. Tom Montalbano, a Syosset-Woodbury historian who researched the Syosset crash, created that group.

Larry Moses, 70, a professional trumpeter from upstate New Windsor, is one of them. Moses was a 15-year-old band member about to start his freshman year at Syosset High School. The band was 40 minutes into a long drive home from Syracuse when Moses left his seat near the front of the bus in search of a newspaper’s sports section. He started walking toward the back. Then, “I felt the bus swerve … the bus driver’s head went down. Two seconds after, we smashed into a bridge abutment.”

His seatmate and two boys sitting behind them were killed. Moses passed out and woke to a priest giving him last rites.

“I saw a light come out of my chest, go up to the clouds, turn around and go back into my chest,” he said in an interview. He is not sure what that light was, all these years later, and said he didn’t talk about it then.

Moses spent 10 days in a hospital with broken ribs, a concussion and a stitched-up leg. When he got out, he spent the first part of his freshman year in a wheelchair. People told him he was less outgoing after the crash than before. He had difficulty riding in a car as a passenger, and even now the deep breaths that his job requires sometimes yield jagged pain.

But the crash also gave him a rare, powerful perspective he said he could share with the younger musicians.

“I feel like I’ve been playing with house money my whole life,” he said. “Anytime things go wrong, I can measure it against that — this isn’t that bad. I’ve been through worse.”

Trauma never leaves

Richard Berman, 72, of Plantation, Florida, also has joined the group. Berman, one of the band's student leaders at the time of the crash, was riding in an accompanying bus. The adults asked him to help rescue his bandmates, he said.

“They took me off. No one else was allowed off the bus," Berman said. "They brought me over and said, ‘You have to help us get everybody else off.’ ”

The trauma of seeing his three bandmates’ bodies has never left him.

“It may sound trite or whatever, but not a day has gone by and for some reason I’ve seen that picture of the three kids,” he said.

Some days are worse than others. Once, he said, his crash memories — triggered by images of a school shooting — made him hyperventilate and sweat. Berman said he could not bring himself to ride a bus for years.

He never sought therapy for the crash, but made it a practice as a lawyer representing injured workers to refer his clients to psychologists.

Like Moses, Berman said he hoped his experience could help the younger musicians.

“I’ve chosen to remember it, I’ve chosen to adopt it,” he said. “I accept it is one of the things that made me who I am.” But, he said, “I’ve had a multitude of significant events, good and bad. This is one of many.”

Two Lawrence crash survivors said their experience had left them grateful to be alive.

Joyce Liebeskind, now of Calabasas, California, was a 17-year-old junior summer camp counselor at the time of the crash. She’d gotten out of her seat to talk to some young campers when the bus “went over a cliff.” As the bus tumbled, she fell through a window and came to rest near the bottom of a hill.

“I looked up after I landed … I saw the bus flying through the air," Liebeskind said. "I couldn’t move, and then the bus fell on top of me … I thought I was dead.”

Her stomach tightened last month when she read about the Farmingdale crash. The band members were “on their way to something they looked forward to, that was exciting and special,” just as it had been for Liebeskind and her young charges, she said.

Back then, Liebeskind spent seven weeks with a compound fractured pelvis, broken bones in her foot and burns. She still gets anxious on public transit. But “life has been good,” she said. She runs the office for her husband’s podiatry practice, and they have children and grandchildren.

“I think many people take their life experience for granted, and I do not,” she said. Like Capozzi, her advice was to look forward, not back: “You just have to keep forging ahead. Otherwise, you are going to be consumed by it."

Gratitude for being alive

Mindy Haar, of Woodmere, assistant dean for undergraduate affairs at New York Institute of Technology’s School of Health Professions and a registered dietician-nutritionist, also was on the Hillel bus. She thinks the crash may have influenced her career choice.

“There are a certain number of things you can’t control, but at least in this field you can guide people on wellness and the factors that are under our control,” she said.

A year after the crash, Haar's parents signed permission slips allowing her to ride buses on field trips. She started driving at 16.

“All those things gave me more confidence in myself and let me navigate what I had to navigate,” she said. “There are still going to be times of sadness. It becomes part of you. But you embrace the good things, you feel gratitude for being alive.”

In Smithtown, Maureen Harjus, who was aboard the East Meadow bus when it crashed, has a career as a paralegal and a family that she loves. But she knew Michael Capozzi and David Levinton. She came through with minor physical injuries, but her world changed. 

“As a child, you think you’re going to live forever," she said. "You definitely lose some of that."

Putting her daughter on the school bus for the first time last year was nerve-wracking.

“I’m not a good passenger to this day,” she said. “That what-if factor is still there. Then I think this can’t possibly happen again. This can’t strike me twice in a lifetime.”

With Michael Gormley