Driver May Have Fallen Asleep

A bus driver may have fallen asleep before his vehicle slammed into an oncoming bus on a desolate Mexican highway and killed 25 people, a Mexican state prosecutor said Tuesday.

Survivors aboard the deluxe Elite commercial bus said the driver seemed to be dozing off, said Vicky Salazar, a prosecutor for the Mexican state of Sonora.

“They’re not sure, but it seems like he was falling asleep. He was only driving by himself from Mexico City,” said Salazar, who is leading the investigation.

Salazar had said Monday that there were two drivers. However, only one appeared on the preliminary list of dead and injured, and Salazar said her staff could not explain the discrepancy.

The southbound Transportes de Pacifico bus was traveling from Tijuana to Guadalajara, west of Mexico City, but investigators were focusing on the northbound bus, headed from Mexico City to Tijuana on a two-day, 1,500-mile trip typically made with two drivers alternating in six-hour shifts.

One passenger on the Elite bus, Antonio Vega Perez, said in a signed statement that he overheard the driver talking to another bus driver about mechanical problems when the bus stopped at Navajoa, about 400 miles south of the crash site.

The driver said “there was some kind of problem with the clutch,” said Vega Perez, who was headed back to his job in Los Angeles. “The bus was making a lot of noise.”

Three other survivors also told investigators they had noticed problems with the brakes, but were ignored when they asked for the brakes to be checked when the bus stopped at Navajoa.