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ATLANTA — As tragedy on Interstate 75 pierces a Georgia morning, a sketchy 911 call at 5:38 a.m. wakes the crew of Engine 23 in the Howell Mill Road firehouse.

"Paramedic Engine 23 respond to I-75 Southbound at Northside Drive, auto accident with injuries."

Three minutes later, as Engine 23 goes under the Northside Drive bridge, the four-man crew becomes the first emergency unit on the scene of the Bluffton University bus accident.

And the first to get a glimpse of the loss.

Capt. Keith Schumacher, a Rayland, Ohio, native who worked the Centennial Park bombings during the 1996 Olympics, wants to jump out and, in his words, "sling bandages."

But nobody else is here yet, and a bus with multiple passengers just flew off a bridge and onto the interstate below. Schumacher gets on the radio and notifies his fire command that this is more than a simple auto accident.

Amid the broken glass, twisted metal, gym bags, plastic water bottles and baseball shoes are young men — some lying on the pavement, some obviously moving, some trapped.

"Engine 8, Engine 26, Truck 11, Truck 26, Paramedic Engine 15, Squad 4, Battalion 2, respond to I-75 Southbound at Northside Drive, an accident with entrapment involving a tour bus."

The smell of diesel fuel is a pungent backdrop to the unmistakable stillness of death.

"Radio be advised there are people underneath the bus."

The initial count: 33 injured.

Schumacher directs his crew to set up a rescue plan for the victims trapped under the motorcoach with the Bus No. 2 logo.

The captain then walks through the broken windshield and into the belly of the bus.

He checks the bus driver and his wife, Jerry and Jean Niemeyer, who are still strapped into their seats.

Thirty-five victims.

Schumacher moves on, past the dead bus driver and his wife, and hollers toward the back, "If you can hear me, let me hear you! If you can walk to me, walk to my voice!"

He wants anyone who can move on their own off the bus and out of the "hot zone." Team members with bruises, cuts and broken bones are shepherded away from the crumpled vehicle.

Brandon Freytag, the junior from Wapakoneta who miraculously landed on his feet in the crash and escaped the bus through the emergency hatch, huddles with a group of players against a median wall.

"We were all wondering who passed away," Brandon said.

Ten feet apart

Before they were ejected from the Bluffton team bus as it plummeted off an overpass and onto one of the nation's busiest interstates, 18-year-old freshman Zach Arend and 22-year-old senior Tim Berta were sitting about 10 feet apart.

Just minutes after the crash, rescue workers find them on the pavement — 10 feet from each other. Both are critically injured, taken from the scene by ambulance before crews know who they are.

Like all the young men on Bus No. 2, they are Midwest-born and baseball-bred.

Tim was playing catch with his dad at 10 months and watching baseball on television by the age of 2. He had such a wealth of knowledge about the game that when he quit the Bluffton team between his sophomore and junior years to concentrate on football, coach James Grandey talked him into staying on as a paid student coach.

Zach, too, breathed baseball. All through high school he collected baseball cards, memorizing the statistics of his favorite players and mimicking their hitting styles. Grandey won a three-way recruiting battle for the Paulding High School pitcher over two rival schools — Defiance and Tiffin. All of the coaches liked Zach's pleasant demeanor. That and his nasty changeup.

At Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital, Zach undergoes surgery to have his spleen removed and is in a coma.

Tim isn't faring much better. He has broken ribs on both sides of his body, his left collarbone and shoulder blade are fractured and doctors have to take out his spleen as well.

But there is a more serious problem. A blood clot on the outer left side of his brain will force surgeons to remove a larger-than-baseball-size portion of his skull to enable his brain to swell, so it doesn't press on the brain stem.

At his home in Ida, Mich., word of the accident hasn't reached Tim's parents, Robb and Karen Berta. They sleep as doctors battle to save their son's life.

'Getting out

of Dodge'

A.J. Ramthun, a freshman from Springfield, escaped the wreckage by slogging through ankle-high diesel fuel and leaving the bus through an opening where the windshield used to be. As he moved past the front seats, sophomore catcher Curt Schroeder pushed aside the arm of the bus driver's wife, Jean Niemeyer.

"We didn't realize at the time we were reaching out and pushing this lady's arm," A.J. would say later. "We were getting out of Dodge."

A piece of A.J.'s broken left collarbone sticks through the skin and blood is dripping from scratches on his face. But his pain goes beyond his physical injuries. He doesn't know where his brother Mike is, and he can't shed the image of his friend Cody Holp being thrown from the bus.

A.J. had always credited Cody with making him a better baseball player — mostly by teaching him not to dwell on his mistakes. Cody's motto: "Just laugh it off, man, or it will only get worse."

Cody and A.J. were hoping to meet girls on the trip, just freshmen acting their age and playing baseball in the Florida sun. Best of all, they were going to do it together.

As A.J. waits to be transported to Piedmont Hospital, he is struck by the "absolute carnage" around him. Everyone seems to be nursing injuries — some serious, some worse — yet somehow he walked out under his own power. He doesn't know what happened to most of his teammates.

As he sits in the ambulance, he doesn't even know if his brother Mike is alive.

Etching a new profile

James Grandey, the 29-year-old Bluffton coach, is used to taking charge, but not today. Today he is sitting on a median wall so dazed that he asks Tyler Hill, a sophomore pitcher from London, Ohio, to call his wife, Jessica, for him.

Jessica Gates met Jim Grandey when he passed her on the steps surrounding the track at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. Grandey was a graduate assistant and Jessica a sophomore star on the basketball team. His pickup line? "Oh, you're in a bad mood today." Jessica wasn't, but he got her attention. They had their first child, Ayla, 11 weeks before the Bluffton bus set off for Florida.

Jessica is in Ayla's room a little before 6 a.m. on Friday when she hears her cell phone vibrate. She doesn't recognize the flashing number, but decides to take the call. Tyler tells her the team has been in a wreck and that her husband is OK. She thinks it's a fender-bender.

Capt. Schumacher sees Grandey on the median wall and calls for help to move the 6-foot, 3-inch, 290-pound coach into an ambulance, the same one A.J. is in. Grandey complains about blood in his mouth, and A.J. is asked to hold the suction tube while paramedics clear a passageway to his coach's throat. Grandey doesn't seem to know how injured he is, doesn't know the swelling and broken bones in his face have etched a new profile. His right foot tilts inward and a bone juts through the skin.

"It looked like somebody went to town on him with a baseball bat, " A.J. would say later.

'Start with him'

Trapped with the dead underneath Bus No. 2 are A.J. Ramthun's brother, Mike, and Chris Bauman of Milford.

Chris is pinned along a row of windows. The glass has been blown out, allowing him to move his head, but his lower body is stuck. He begs teammates to try to lift the bus.

It doesn't budge.

Mike's body, too, is in an awkward position. He can move his upper body, but his left leg is pinned under the motorcoach. He can't move his right leg either, because it's stuck under his left. A teammate manages to straighten out Mike's right leg, which allows him at least to wiggle his toes.

Just three feet away, another teammate lies silent. "We're going to get off the bus," Mike promises the silent player.

Firefighters arrive and ask Mike if anyone else needs help. He can hear Chris' moans and tells them, "Start with him."

Paramedics free Chris, sliding the junior outfielder into the ambulance with A.J. and Coach Grandey.

The silent player is taken to an ambulance, too, but the doors open a few minutes later. The body of Scott Harmon, a freshman from Elida who gained the most in the bench press and squat during an off-season weight-lifting program, is covered with a white sheet.

Rescue crews aren't done; Mike is still under the bus. Firefighters can't cut him out because of the way the bus is positioned. They're going to have to lift it.

"Buddy, we're getting air bags," a firefighter tells him.

Crews place eight high-pressure air bags under the bus to push it up. The bags move the vehicle as firefighters wedge in cribbing to build a platform. Fire Battalion Chief Paul Morley, in charge of safety at the scene, plays devil's advocate in his mind. What if the bus moves in a wrong direction?

Nothing happens for two minutes.

Two more.

Finally, relief. The air bags lift the bus enough so that Mike's leg is free.

"Oh, thank you," he thinks, his leg still numb from the crushing weight that left him unable to move for a full 45 minutes.

Soon the feeling returns — and the pain. Two firefighters carry him to an ambulance, where he is transported to Grady.

Although they are at different hospitals, the Ramthun brothers soon learn each escaped with relatively minor injuries — incredible when you consider where they were sitting.

Both were just inches away from someone who died in the crash.

Unspeakable burdens

As the injured victims are taken to three hospitals, four unidentified bodies remain on the interstate under the Northside Drive bridge, out of view of the hovering TV helicopters in what is rapidly becoming a national news story.

Most of the players are dressed identically in gray Bluffton sweat suits. They all have short hair.

They are John Does.

Dr. James Augustine, a transplanted Ohioan who is medical director for the Atlanta Fire Department, has worked plenty of accident scenes since becoming a volunteer firefighter at Kettering Fire Station No. 7 while in medical school in 1981. Identifying bodies comes with his job, but he doesn't have much to work with here. All the coaches have been taken to hospitals. Police, fire and rescue personnel don't know who these kids are.

Only their teammates do.

Augustine asks for the team captain. In truth, they don't have one, but shortstop Ryan Baightel was co-captain last year as a sophomore and speaks up. He agrees to help identify the bodies.

Augustine questions Ryan again before placing an unspeakable burden on a 21-year-old. "Do you know what kind of shoes they might be wearing, what kind of tattoos, a watch, anything that might help to identify them?"

A shoeless Ryan borrows the doctor's fire boots for the short walk in the early-morning chill to the makeshift morgue. The bodies are covered by white sheets and lying side by side on backboards and metal cage cradles.

The doctor carefully uncovers each body, just enough for Ryan to make an ID. Firefighters follow behind, placing a number on the sheet and on each victim's right hand.

Sophomore Tyler Williams of Lima becomes No. 1. A hooded sweat shirt still covers his hair. A brown wallet, tucked into his pants pocket along with his Ohio driver's license, holds some of the proceeds from his CD sales: three $50 bills, four 20s, three 10s, three 5s, a single, two quarters, one dime, two pennies, a $2 bill and a foreign currency bill.

The body of infielder David Betts of Bryan, Ohio, also a sophomore, gets marked with the No. 2. A yellow "LiveStrong" bracelet encircles his left wrist.

Scott Harmon is No. 3. The 212-pound freshman, who put everybody before himself, dies with empty pockets, no jewelry and no markings.

A black tattoo in a dragon motif surrounds freshman Cody Holp's right upper arm. The 19-year-old pitcher from Arcanum gets marked No. 4.

In an instant, life ended for four promising young men.

With assistance from Edwards and Sons Mortuary, their bodies are placed into blue body bags.

News flashes

Robb Berta is watching the morning news at home in Michigan when an alert running across the bottom of the screen announces six are dead in a bus crash in Atlanta.

First it says the crash involves a youth baseball team.

Later it says it's a college team.

The next news flash sends shivers: The team is from Bluffton.

Berta and his wife, Karen, frantically search news broadcasts, hoping to see footage of their son Tim, a student coach at Bluffton.

At one point they think they see him, but as the television stations show the same video clip over and over, Karen realizes it isn't Tim.

They don't know if their son is alive.

Cody stories

While the Bertas study television reports for news about their son, Larry Gray and Kim Askins board an AirTran flight from Dayton to Atlanta.

Their sons, Austin Gray and Cody Holp, have been teammates since they were in grade school. The two families are so close that Larry's wife, Jodi, gave her plane ticket to Kim so she could get to Atlanta right away. But as they sit side by side throughout the excruciating trip to Atlanta, the two parents' circumstances couldn't be further apart.

Larry knows Austin is OK because he heard from him minutes after the accident. Kim is still waiting for Cody's call.

Larry tries to distract Kim by pointing out views from the window while they tell Cody stories. Gray, a longtime youth baseball coach in Lewisburg, coached Cody when he was just 10 years old. The team went 72-14 that season, playing all over the country. Not only was Cody a good player, he kept everybody loose. As Gray huddled with his players after games to review their performances, Cody would interject his own commentary, often cracking up the team — and his coach — in the process.

Kim loves talking about her son, but something is gnawing at her. A Grady hospital staffer called Gray to report that Austin was in stable condition, but they wouldn't tell him anything about Cody.

Gray suggests Cody may be unconscious or in surgery.

He knows he doesn't sound very convincing.

Possible causes

About 4½ hours after the accident, the first wave of National Transportation Safety Board investigators arrives from their Atlanta office. Six others follow from Washington, D.C.

They're here to sift through wreckage, interview victims and witnesses, and record data on everything from what the driver did in the hours before the crash to survival factors — why some players lived while the teammates sitting beside them perished.

Jerry Niemeyer, the investigators say, probably mistook the left-hand High Occupancy Vehicle lane exit for part of the highway and couldn't stop the bus before it crashed into the wall and flipped onto the interstate below.

But were other factors involved?

Although they make no formal determination, investigators quickly dismiss mechanical problems. The bus passed an inspection by the Ohio Highway Patrol on Feb. 23, just seven days before the crash.

Investigators also focus on whether the highway markings and signs were adequate. Accidents have occurred here before — two of them fatal over the past nine years. Twelve days after the crash, Georgia Transportation officials erect a larger stop sign and paint more markings on the roadway.

The investigators' third focus is on Niemeyer: his experience, his health and his actions during the critical moments before and after steering the bus onto the HOV exit.

Nothing about the Niemeyers' actions prior to the crash seemed to raise any flags. After driving to Adairsville, Ga., on Thursday in a van owned by the bus company — Executive Coach Luxury Travel Inc. of Ottawa, Ohio — Jerry and Jean Niemeyer checked into the 50-room Comfort Inn just after 7:30 p.m. The bus driver asked for a wake-up call and picked up a menu for a local pizza parlor. Blood and urine samples from his body would later show the presence of ibuprofen, therapeutic levels of the antidepressant Sertraline and the anti-hypertensive drug Atenolol.

He had no alcohol in his system.

When Niemeyer drove onto the interstate from the Quick Trip gas station in Adairsville, 54 miles north of Atlanta, the motorcoach had a full tank: 243 gallons of diesel fuel. The 65-year-old driver was making his third Florida trip — the upperclassmen at Bluffton called him by his first name — and had a clean driving record. Putnam County records show one speeding ticket, in 1992.

NTSB spokesman Paul Schlamm said investigators will release their findings to the public shortly before the five-member safety board rules on the cause of the accident, which could take a year.

But Carl Wolcott, lead investigator for the Atlanta police, said his investigation already has a finding: driver error.

"The bus driver didn't realize where he was," Wolcott said. "He wasn't being mean. There wasn't anything wrong with him. He did the best he could.

"He just made a mistake."

Blue eyes

After a flurry of phone calls, Robb and Karen Berta finally locate their son. He is at Grady Memorial Hospital, a Level 1 trauma center in downtown Atlanta.

So is Zach Arend. In their current conditions, hospital officials can't tell them apart.

Since it will be hours before the parents can get to Atlanta, the hospital recruits Robin Fosdick, Tim Berta's cousin, to make a positive identification.

She can't. The boys' faces are so distorted from swelling she isn't sure which one is Tim. She stands on a stool so she can look directly down on their faces, but that doesn't help. Finally, telephone calls to both mothers give Fosdick a clue: Tim has blue eyes, Zach brown.

She's now confident that Tim is in Room 15. Hospital officials quickly phone the parents with a report on the conditions of their sons.

Blue-eyed Tim Berta and brown-eyed Zach Arend are both critical.

A distinctive tattoo

Kim Askins has already arrived in Atlanta when her husband Bob gets a call from the Fulton County medical examiner.

Bob, who plans to catch a later flight after arranging for a baby sitter for their two young children, is asked about Cody's distinctive tattoo, the dragon motif on his right arm.

The question briefly gives him hope that his stepson is alive, but he soon learns they only need the information to make a positive identification.

Whatever hope he had is gone. Askins agonizes over whether to give Kim the news in a phone call, finally deciding to call her to see if Larry Gray can provide some support. But when he asks to speak to Gray, who is in another room, Kim knows it can only mean her son is dead.

"It can't be!" she cries.

Then she falls to her knees.

'The face I married'

The entire flight down from Ohio, Jessica Grandey worries about her husband.

Rumors have been flying about Coach Grandey's condition. First, some of the players thought he was dead. Then the talk was that you couldn't recognize him.

Dr. John David Mullins, Grandey's plastic surgeon, has heard the rumors and releases as much information as he can. "He had a lot of swelling, which is normally the case," Mullins says.

Grandey has a compound fracture in his right lower leg and most of his major facial bones are broken, including both eye sockets, both cheekbones, his nose and his upper and lower jaw.

Incredibly, he didn't chip a single tooth.

When Jessica sees her husband for the first time, she is relieved, telling herself, "That's the face I married."

Grandey, who has trouble talking, furiously scribbles notes to his wife, wanting information about his players. Doctors have unplugged the TV in his room to shield him from endless updates about the crash.

"We don't really know all the details yet," his family tells him.

When Bluffton Athletic Director Phil Talavinia finally delivers the news, Jessica has to leave the room.

When she returns, he tells her, "I can't believe these four are gone."

Joyful reunions

Throughout the afternoon and evening, the Bluffton players who were treated and released — the walking wounded — trickle into the private lobby of the Marriott Marquis, where some of their parents are waiting along with a mountain of donated sandwiches, apples, bananas and fruit cups.

The players wear drab green scrubs, footies or flip-flops, exchanged for their diesel fuel-soaked team sweats. A local Wal-Mart sends socks, underwear and some oversized pants and shirts. The hotel provides nonstop coffee.

Parents hug them, ruffle their hair, hold their hands. The players don't seem to mind being treated like they're in junior high.

"It was such a relief," junior pitcher Tyler Sprunger recalled later. "It's an unbelievable burden lifted when you're finally able to let yourself go and feel comfortable around someone."

One player boasts about being indestructible.

Kim Askins, who hears him, becomes upset.

Then she feels guilty.

"I wouldn't wish this on anyone," she reminds herself.

A bedside whisper

The Bertas intend to go directly to Grady Memorial Hospital after arriving in Atlanta. Instead, they are redirected to the Marriott Marquis, where Red Cross volunteers are debriefing the families and checking them into the hotel.

Another set of parents gets helped before the Bertas, who are asked to wait.

And wait.

A soft-spoken Karen tries to follow procedure, but all she can think about is her critically injured son. She stares down at the carpet, trying to will herself to be patient. Finally, she says, "I don't want to be here."

Atlanta Fire Department Chaplain Warren Henry hears her and drives the family to Grady, where they try to compose themselves. They don't want Tim to feel their anxiety.

A nurse stops them just outside his door, unsure if this is the right set of parents. "We had to tell them how we knew he was our son," Karen says.

After convincing the nurse, the Bertas are admitted into Tim's room. He isn't moving, can't open his eyes. His head is so swollen that Robb has trouble distinguishing his features.

"I didn't recognize his face," he says later. "I recognized him from two moles on his arm."

They want to hold their son, take away his pain.

They give him the only thing they can.

Karen stands at Tim's bedside and whispers, "Mom and Dad are here."