“There was just glass everywhere. Blood. Kids everywhere. The worst thing you could ever imagine as a mother,” Bryson and Rigel’s mother, Brittany Fisher tells Inside Edition.
Two young brothers were headed to their first day of school when police say a car drifted across a lane and crashed into their school bus. One of the boys' classmates died in the crash. There were no seat belts on the bus, a factor that the young brothers' mother believes could have possibly helped lessen the severity of the tragedy.
“There was just glass everywhere. Blood. Kids everywhere. The worst thing you could ever imagine as a mother,” Bryson and Rigel’s mother, Brittany Fisher tells Inside Edition.
Bryson, 11, got a severe concussion from the incident last August. His younger brother, Rigel, flew upwards, smashing against the ceiling.
“The front of the bus was really wrecked, like it was completely destroyed,” Bryson said.
There were 81 fatal school bus collisions in 2021, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
“That boy would still be alive today if there were seat belts on buses," Brittany says.
Seat belt safety expert Melissa Dobbs brought Inside Edition IMMI's Center for Advanced Product Evaluation testing facility in Westfield, Indiana to show how violent bus crashes can get when kids are not safely buckled.
In a demonstration, child mannequins without seat belts got thrown around the bus when it slammed into a wall at 30 miles an hour.
“The unbelted students didn’t do nearly as well as the belted students did. You can see we have a couple kids actually completely out of the seats in the aisle way,” Dobbs says. “It absolutely is a nightmare.”
Experts say the biggest reason why most states have not adopted seat belt laws is because of the cost. Currently, children are only required to be buckled in on newer buses in eight states where seat belt legislation has been passed.
One such state is New Jersey, where teachers at the D.A. Quarles Early Childhood Center in Englewood invited us aboard to show how every kid gets buckled up.
Brittany is one of many parents advocating for safer school buses throughout the country.
“If your child is involved in an accident like this and God forbid they lose their life, you’re going to feel passionately about trying to implement some kind of change,” Brittany said.
