A school bus carrying about 40 students had just left Hancock Middle School in Hancock County, Mississippi on April 22nd when driver Leah Taylor, 46, suffered a severe asthma attack and blacked out at the wheel on a four-lane highway, leaving the moving vehicle with nobody in control. What happened next unfolded in seconds: 12-year-old sixth grader Jackson Casnave, sitting directly behind the driver, saw the bus beginning to swerve and jumped up to grab the wheel while shouting for help, and another sixth grader, Darrius Clark, also 12, ran forward and slammed on the brakes, the two of them steering the bus onto the median between the highway lanes and bringing it to a stop. Jackson said afterward that he had no time to process his emotions and only wanted to make sure nobody got hurt, a line that tells you something about the kind of kid he is.
The teamwork did not stop once the bus was stopped. Darrius’s older sister Kayleigh, 13, called 911 from the front of the bus, barely able to hear the emergency operator over the screaming of dozens of panicking classmates. Eighth grader Destiny Cornelius, 15, spotted the nebulizer that Taylor was clutching, administered the medication to the unconscious driver, while 13-year-old McKenzy Finch held Taylor’s head steady and used the driver’s ringing phone to alert the school district’s transportation team about what had happened. Taylor has since made a full recovery and told reporters she was grateful to her students for saving her life and the lives of everyone else on that bus. The school honored all five students with a pep rally on Friday and a lunch outing at the restaurant of their choosing, and the principal said what they did took a kind of courage that most adults would struggle to find in the same moment.
