Man Killed After Hijacking Bus Of Disabled Students Swat Team Shoots Miami Man, Supposedly Distraught Over Large Debt To Irs, After 90-Minute Ordeal
A heavily armed police SWAT team stormed a yellow school bus on Miami Beach Thursday to shoot and kill a man who had forced the driver and her passengers - 11 disabled elementary school students - on a harrowing, 90-minute ride to a world-famous seafood restaurant where the hijacker worked as a waiter.
Claiming to have a grudge against the Internal Revenue Service, and either a bomb or a weapon in his pocket, the man police identified as Nick Sang, 42, was slain outside Joe’s Stone Crab Restaurant as television news crews in the air and on the ground recorded the action live for national television broadcast.
With the children and the bus driver still on board, about a dozen officers wearing flak jackets surrounded the bus when it arrived at the restaurant, and one officer fired a single shot that struck the suspect.
The bus lurched forward, struck a parked car, and when the bus came to a stop several officers rushed into the open doorway and fired several more shots, according to police.
Fearing a canister in the man’s possession might be the explosive he claimed it was, the officers immediately dragged the man’s body off the bus and into an alley behind the restaurant as the terrified students and the driver scrambled out the bus’s back door.
The canister turned out not to be a bomb, but a portable oxygen tank belonging to one of the children, police said. No weapon was found.
No serious injuries were reported to either the bus driver, 47-year-old Alicia Reyes Chapman, or the stunned and crying students, who ranged from five to 11 years in age and have a variety of developmental problems, including autism. One child was treated for cuts suffered from glass shattered by the bullets.
The drama began about 8:15 a.m. when Sang reportedly forced his way onto the bus behind a mother helping her child board for the short ride to Blue Lakes Elementary School, about 15 miles southwest of downtown. Aboard the bus then were 13 students, one child’s mother and an adult aide, Dorothy Williams.
Metro Dade Police Director Fred Taylor said that minutes before boarding the bus, Sang had run out of a nearby church. “He was distraught, yelling,” apparently over a large IRS debt, Taylor said.
Seeing the bus stopped as he left the church, Sang pushed his way aboard, telling Chapman he was carrying a bomb and would blow up the bus if she did not take him to an IRS office.
Undetected by the hijacker, Chapman said she switched on the microphone of her radio and concealed it under her leg, thereby enabling the bus dispatcher to learn of the situation. The dispatcher notified police. As police cars appeared to follow the bus, now northbound on a freeway, Chapman said the hijacker began demanding a cellular phone so he could talk directly to police.
He ordered Chapman to stop twice in attempts to find a phone. During a second stop, the mother, two students and Williams, 47, were allowed to get off.
Eventually, a Florida State Highway patrol officer pulled alongside the slow-moving bus and tossed his cellular phone to the hijacker through the open doorway.
Taylor said Sang talked to a police negotiator, but the hijacker’s demands were unclear.
By the time the bus reached the causeway over Biscayne Bay to Miami Beach, it was accompanied by a caravan of up to 50 police.
Before the bus arrived at Joe’s, a landmark on south Miami Beach, police had cleared a path for the hijacked vehicle.
Three hours after their ordeal began, the children were loaded aboard another yellow school bus and returned 15 miles to their school, where anxious parents waited.