HOUSTON -- March 9, 1983, she was a 9-year-old student on an HISD school bus headed to T.H. Rogers School.
A big-rig truck hauling a flatbed trailer jackknifed. The trailer pierced the right side of the school bus near the center sets, ripping out a gaping hole. Noreen Khan-Mayberry, seated near the front of the bus, was among the students who survived. An 11-year-old female classmate seated near the point of impact, did not.
"The memories of the accident came back almost instantaneously," she said of her reaction to the crash this week. "This happened over 30 years ago, and hearing the accident brought all of the memories back.
"For years, whenever my mother passed an 18-wheeler, I would shake," Khan-Mayberry said of the lingering effects of the crash. "It was so traumatic that eventually I just begged my mom, 'Please don't put me back on the bus.'"
Khan-Mayberry, who works as a health and wellness expert and is employed as Space Toxicologist at NASA working with the safety of spacecraft environmental systems, says that trauma, that post-traumatic stress can be overcome. She wants to reach out to the families involved in the Telephone Road bus crash to offer the counseling and advice of someone who truly understands what they are going through.
"I know what it's like to survive through that. I know survivor's guilt. I know survivor's remorse. There was guilt. I did feel guilty. I wondered why, why I survived," she said. "Sometimes it's better to talk to someone who's been through it as opposed to someone who is a clinician.
"Everyone's a victim at this point," she said of anyone and everyone involved in the crash. Victims who can perhaps best get help from others who have traveled and navigated this same horrible road."
