Witness: Truck on Fire Before Hitting Bus

A woman who had what may be the best view of a FedEx truck before it smashed into a bus insists on a jarring detail—the truck was already on fire before the accident. "It was in flames as it came through the median," Bonnie Duran tells KNBC-TV. "It was already in flames. It wasn’t coming from the front engine, it was more from behind the cab." Duran was driving a Nissan Altima that the FedEx truck hit before colliding head-on with the tour bus. The Nissan ended up in a ditch, but Duran and husband Joe emerged relatively unscathed.

“It was like a 3-D movie,” Joe Duran tells CBS Sacramento. “Imagine a Mack truck coming out of a movie.” The account of the truck being on fire before the crash conflicts with early reports that the two vehicles burst into flames upon impact. Investigators have said it could take months to determine what caused the crash, given the extent of the fire damage, notes the LA Times. Among the 10 people killed was a 17-year-old high school senior whose identical twin was riding in a separate bus. (More FedEx stories.)