Drunken Driving Crash Links Survivors

LOUISVILLE, Ky. | One received a football scholarship years after burns and lung damage kept him in the hospital for two months. Another poured her grief into preventing other alcohol-fueled crashes and became president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. A third began speaking publicly about the tragedy only after two decades of staring at scars in the mirror.

Harold Dennis, Karolyn Nunnallee and Ciaran Madden remain linked by the deadliest alcohol-caused highway catastrophe in U.S. history.

On May 14, 1988, Dennis and Madden were teenage passengers on a church-owned school bus headed home from an amusement park. They were pulled from the wreckage of the fiery crash that killed 27 people in northern Kentucky, while Nunnallee lost her 10-year-old daughter.

The tragedy helped change Americans' attitudes toward drunken driving, and may also have contributed to a nationwide decline in alcohol-related highway deaths since the 1980s. Lawmakers in Kentucky took action to improve school bus safety following the crash.

Madden was among the 67 people aboard the bus owned by the First Assembly of God church in Radcliff when a pickup driving the wrong way on Interstate 71 slammed into the vehicle. The collision jolted loose the bus' fuel tank, which was then punctured and ignited. The flames blocked the front entrance, sending screaming children out the windows and to a bottleneck at the rear exit.

Dennis, then 14, was pulled unconscious from the rear of the bus by a passer-by. His face, torso and shoulder sustained third-degree burns, and he suffered lung damage. He spent two months in the hospital, a stay that he said seems longer than the 20 years since.

The driver of the pickup, Larry Mahoney, was convicted of assault, manslaughter, wanton endangerment and drunken driving, and served 9 1/2 years in prison. Now 54, he has avoided interviews. Calls to a listing in his name in Owen County were not returned.

Mahoney "didn't set out to kill 27 people and maim 19 others," said Nunnallee, whose daughter Patty was the youngest killed in the crash. "That was not his intent, but it happened. And it can happen to anyone."

Nunnallee got involved with her local MADD chapter after the crash and became president of the national organization in 1998. As MADD president, she spoke out against Super Bowl beer ads, and she remains active in her local chapter in Polk County, Fla.