CAMPBELL COUNTY, Kentucky, January 25, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― A man is dead after driving his car into the path of a bus taking students from Covington Catholic High School home from the March for Life.
Fox News reported that the “Gold Shield Transportation” charter bus and a car collided on the AA Highway and California Crossroads intersection around 7 AM this morning.
Catholic News Agency (CNA) reported that the bus was carrying students from Covington Catholic High School and their chaperones. A priest on the bus gave “a final blessing” to the driver. At least four other people were injured in the crash, and at least two were taken to hospital. According to local news station WLWT, the front passenger side of the bus was damaged by the impact, and the children on board climbed out the windows to escape.
A witness told Fox News that he saw the car driving straight at him at about 6:30 AM this morning, on the wrong side of the road, when he got out of the way. On his way back, he saw that the car had crashed into the bus.
Although Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann attended the March for Life, it is not known if he was on this bus or on one of the other three buses in the convoy taking the students home. There were a total of 200 people aboard the buses.
The Diocese of Covington has released a statement saying: “This morning, a bus carrying students and chaperones home from the March for Life in Washington, DC was involved in an accident. EMT personnel and the Campbell County police have been at the scene and are handling the matter. Please join us in praying for everyone involved in this accident.”
Covington Catholic High School made international news after last year's March for Life, when the mainstream media claimed a video showed a group of its students harassing an elderly Native American veteran on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But additional extended video and firsthand accounts soon revealed that the man, Nathan Phillips, was the one who waded into the group waiting for its bus and decided to beat a drum inches from student Nick Sandmann’s face.
In fact, it was a number of adults with a group called the “Black Israelites” who had begun the confrontation by shouting racial abuse at the students. The Covington Catholic boys performed school cheers in an attempt to drown out the harassment, and did not respond to adults’ insults and abuse in kind.
In the wake of these revelations, journalists and other public figures quickly deleted their snap condemnations of the students, while some either tried to keep the original narrative alive or refused to unequivocally retract or apologize for their initial claims, leading to various lawsuits on behalf of the boys.
Sandmann filed defamation suits against the networks, including a $250 million suit against CNN for broadcasting into “millions of homes” the “idea that [Sandmann] was part of a mob…yelling racist slurs,” according to attorney L. Lin Wood.
On January 7, the suit against CNN was settled for an as-yet-undisclosed sum.