Crash witness: 'The worst thing I've ever seen'

A survivor of a horrific 2003 Northwest Tollway crash that claimed the lives of eight women testified about seeing two of her friends killed, one who died lying atop her, as the trial of a truck driver charged with causing the pileup got under way Monday.

Vincente Zepeda, 54, of Chicago, faces eight counts of reckless homicide stemming from the Oct. 1, 2003, collision that authorities say he caused by driving too fast as his semi-trailer approached a traffic backup just west of the Marengo/Hampshire Toll Plaza.

The truck, weighing more than 70,000 pounds with its full load, slammed into the back of a 25-passenger tour bus, killing eight women returning from an outing at a Rockford-area Japanese gardens and injuring a dozen others. The victims were members of International Women's Associates, an organization of foreign women living in the Chicago area.

McHenry County prosecutors opened their case against Zepeda with victims' family members recounting their final moments with their loved ones and eyewitness accounts of the crash and the chaos that ensued.

"It was the worst thing I've ever seen," said Tom Bell, a Kirkland man who pulled over at the crash scene to help the victims. "People were injured, hysterically out of control, bleeding all over."

One of the crash's survivors, Ana Manglano, said she was sitting on the bus next to friend Sonia Aladjem when she noticed traffic slowing around them and looked up at the driver.

"The (driver) turned his head to the left and then there was a terrible impact," she said. "I was going to lose consciousness, but God kept me awake."

Aladjem and another friend sitting just in front of them, Ce Ellis of Chicago, did not survive.

"Ce was on top of me, her head was on my shoulder and her heart was on my hand," Manglano testified. "I saw Sonia in the front of the bus, totally unconscious."

Also killed were Olga Buenz, Marita Landa, Jane Hand, Irma Oppenheimer and Jeanet Notardonato, all of Chicago, and Peg Albert of Glenview.

The bus' driver, Kenneth Lipski of Antioch, said Zepeda's truck was traveling "extremely fast" -- as much as 50 mph -- at impact. The bus, and other vehicles around it, were traveling no faster than 15 mph as they approached the toll plaza, Lipski said.

"I had no warning," he said. "All of a sudden we were hit from behind."

In order to convict Zepeda, prosecutors must convince presiding Judge Sharon Prather that Zepeda was not merely a negligent driver, but committed reckless acts that led to the eight deaths.

His attorney, Donald Rendler-Kaplan, said that at worst Zepeda is guilty of not stopping quickly enough to avoid a rear-end collision.

"This was a horrific accident that doesn't rise to a crime," Rendler-Kaplan said in his opening statement. "The way that the truck and the van are constructed led to this result."

The defense lawyer also pinned some of the blame on the toll plaza's design, a point echoed in a 2006 report on the crash by the National Transportation Safety Board. The same report, however, also states Zepeda was driving too fast for conditions and the probable cause of the accident was his failure to slow for traffic.

McHenry County authorities at first charged Zepeda with several vehicle-related offenses. But on the day he was scheduled to face trial for those last year, prosecutors abruptly dropped those allegations and announced they would charge the Chicago man on the more serious reckless homicide charges.