Flash player is required to view weather conditions. Download

BLUFFTON — GAME 1: MARCH 30, 2007

With the sun shining on a perfect day for baseball, Bluffton University's Austin Gray steps to the plate with two men on base and his team trailing 1-0.

In high school, Austin lived for clutch situations like this. When he was a senior at Tri-County North, he once had a week in which he hit .666 with eight doubles, a home run and 12 runs batted in. He was all-conference that year, right along with his best friend, Cody Holp.

The friend whose name and number are on a banner hanging on the left-field wall at Sears Field.

Today is the first time the Bluffton Beavers have taken the field since their team bus crashed onto an interstate highway in Atlanta and killed seven people, including the five players honored by the white banners in the outfield.

It's those banners — and what they symbolize — that brought 2,500 people from across the country here for a game between Bluffton and the College of Mount St. Joseph. Bluffton players Cody Holp, Tyler Williams, Scott Harmon, Zach Arend and David Betts died in the crash, along with bus driver Jerry Niemeyer and his wife Jean.

As Austin comes to bat in the bottom of the second inning, he looks to the third-base coach's box for the sign from interim coach Todd Miller. Coach James Grandey normally would be calling the shots on the field, but injuries to his face and leg keep him in the press box.

Understandably, Austin is nervous.

"Hey, Cody, help me get a hit here," he says to himself.

Strike one.

In the bus crash, Austin suffered a bruised and lacerated hip, a black eye, a cut on his leg and a concussion. But he knows he's fortunate to have been able to walk away.

Strike two.

His black Bluffton baseball jersey flies in the wind. Black. It is not one of the team's colors — those are purple and white. But the players wanted to wear black. Thought it was the best way to remember their teammates.

Ball one.

Austin has played in front of big crowds, but not like this. These people shouldn't all be here. Cody should be here.

Strike three.

Two innings later he grounds out. Then two more strikeouts. His line for the day: 0-for-4, three strikeouts, two errors.

The final score: Mount St. Joseph 10, Bluffton 5.

"I just locked up," Austin says. "I've never played that bad before."

From sleep to God's hands

John Betts has a Ph.D. in psychophysiology, but since the Bluffton bus crash he's become an expert on something else: seat belts.

Betts' son David died from injuries suffered during the crash, which included a six-inch fracture at the base of his skull. Betts believes David died before he was ejected, and after seeing the bus, he's convinced that his son would be alive if he had been wearing a seat belt.

Betts has done the research: 85 percent to 90 percent of the deaths in motorcoach crashes occur in the first seven rows. David was sitting in Row 4. His armrest was broken off, but the seat was otherwise intact.

"He went from sleep to God's hand, in our minds, in three or four seconds. If he had been strapped in ... he's going to be alive. Is he going to have some bruises here?" Betts asks, pointing to his waist. "Yes. Might he have some liver damage? Maybe. But the point is, he's going to be alive."

Federal law requires only the driver on tour buses to wear seat belts. Jerry and Jean Niemeyer, who died in the crash, were both strapped in. No other passengers wore belts. Betts has met with members of Congress about requiring seat belts on buses, and vows to do whatever he can to change the law.

"You can count on the rest of our lives being devoted to that," he said.

On average, motorcoach crashes cause anywhere from 10 to 23 deaths annually, according to government and industry reports. After the Bluffton crash, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration released results of a three-year study that examined one of the primary causes of passenger injury: ejections. The investigators focused on strengthening the roof and adding shatterproof glass rather than adding seat belts. The emphasis was put on structural improvements because they don't require any action on the part of passengers.

When he went to Atlanta on March 2, John Betts visited the crash scene with other parents and walked every inch of the roadway where the bus plummeted over the edge.

It only made him angrier.

"They (bus companies) tout that they go 20 million miles a year and have 20 deaths," Betts said. "Well, hunky freaking dory. That's great. Is one of those 20 your son, daughter, mother, grandmother, uncle or aunt? If it's not, it's just a number."

MARCH 31

In the bottom of the ninth, freshman Brennan Bauman knocks in the winning run in the first game of a doubleheader as Bluffton edges the College of Mount St. Joseph for its first win of the season. Third baseman Austin Gray is 0-for-1 with a strikeout and makes two errors.

'They were our kids, too'

Two days after the doubleheader with the College of Mount St. Joseph, the Cincinnati Reds open their season against the Chicago Cubs. When word reaches the Reds that Bluffton President James Harder is planning to attend, the front office prepares a ceremony honoring the Bluffton bus crash victims.

As the names of the five players who died are displayed on the scoreboard, a sellout crowd observes a moment of silence — followed by applause.

Harder, standing on home plate and flanked by members of the Cubs and Reds, is overcome by emotion.

Four weeks ago, the small Mennonite university of 1,150 students was little known outside its campus nestled between Lima and Findlay.

Now an entire stadium — an entire country — mourns with them.

Two weeks later, the first-year president travels to Atlanta to give thanks to those who reached out to Bluffton in its darkest hour: hospitals, police and fire departments, the Red Cross, a dozen others.

He gives out plaque after plaque in a gesture of thanks and is humbled by the response.

"They were your kids that morning, Dr. Harder," Kenneth Byers of the Atlanta Fire Department tells him. "But they were our kids, too."

APRIL 14

Junior Tim Kay throws a four-hitter against Rose-Hulman, but Bluffton commits five errors and drops its seventh straight game.

Back in Ohio

Bluffton student coach Tim Berta remains hospitalized — the last of the hospitalized victims — but for the first time since the crash, he is back in Ohio.

The 22-year-old senior was thrown from the Bluffton bus, landing 10 feet from Zach Arend, who died one week later. For a time, hospital officials didn't know which patient was Tim and which one was Zach. Tim's cousin, Robin Fosdick, later identified Tim from his eye color: blue.

In Atlanta, surgeons had to remove a large portion of Tim's skull to enable his brain to swell so that it wouldn't press on his brain stem. He regained consciousness and opened his eyes for the first time on March 30, the same day the team returned to the baseball field. Though he was still on a ventilator, he was out of his coma and responsive.

Robb and Karen Berta haven't left their son's side since the crash, helping to exercise his muscles by moving his arms and legs six times a day.

Although Tim remains weak and drifts in and out of consciousness, his doctors decided on April 10 that he was stable enough to be moved. The Bertas returned on a private jet to Ohio, and Tim was admitted to the University Medical Center in Toledo.

The Georgia Department of Organ Donation packed in dry ice the portion of Tim's skull removed the day of the bus crash. The family brought it back with them to Ohio.

APRIL 17

Manchester College pounds out 30 hits in a pair of convincing wins. Bluffton falls to 1-10.

'I put the guys before myself'

Todd Miller can't shake the headaches. He also forgets things.

Notes all over his apartment help him recall what he can't remember: practice times, weight-lifting sessions and phone calls he needs to return.

When he goes to his family home in Franklin, Ind., the young coach lashes out at his parents and siblings.

"I don't think we realized how bad Todd was hurt in the crash," his dad Jeff says.

After Harder announced that the team would play out the season, the 23-year-old Miller took over much of the coaching load from James Grandey.

But Miller's own injury list is extensive: a severe concussion, two broken vertebrae near his neck, stitches in and above his left ear and so many glass and gravel bits in his hand that doctors don't bother to remove them.

Just a few days ago, Miller found out he broke his jaw during the crash. He had a broken jaw for six weeks and did not know it.

He also underwent four hours of neurological tests at Ohio State University to check for brain damage. The doctors told him his brain was bruised and that his headaches may persist for a time, but will eventually fade.

Miller plans on sitting down with a grief counselor at Bluffton, but not now.

Not when so many people depend on him.

"I put the guys before myself," he says.

APRIL 20

The Beavers halt a nine-game losing streak, beating Hanover College 6-1. The team takes vans for the trip to Indiana.

Lucky charm

Austin Gray has had recurring nightmares since the accident. While he is home for a weekend visit, his parents are jolted awake by screams coming from his bedroom.

Larry Gray and his wife Jodi bolt out their door and find Austin sitting on the edge of his bed in a cold sweat. "I'm OK, Dad. I'm fine. It's just one of those dreams," he says.

A counselor at Bluffton tells the Grays their son keeps dreaming that a house is caving in on him and he can't breathe. Austin says those dreams are coming less often now, but thoughts of his friend Cody are still keeping him awake.

"You're thinking about Cody all the time," he says. "Wow, he should be in the building right next to me. He should be knocking on my door."

On the Florida trip, Austin and Mike Ramthun sat together in the sixth row. In front of them was Scott Harmon, and across the aisle Tyler Williams.

Gray decided at about 5 a.m. — roughly 40 minutes before the crash — to stretch out on the floor.

Harmon and Williams died in the crash, while Ramthun suffered a leg injury after being pinned under the bus.

Austin escaped relatively unscathed.

"I don't even know where I'd be if I was sitting in a seat, if I didn't make one move down," he says.

With two weekends to go, Austin just wants the season to end. After hitting .278 as a freshman, he is 1-for-8 this year and hardly gets off the bench.

His mother believes the crash may have affected her son's eyesight. Austin thinks he's just lost focus.

For the Hanover game, the Bluffton players board a bus for the first time since Atlanta. It's not a motorcoach — more like a cross between a school bus and a van — but it still makes some of the players uneasy.

"You think, 'What happens if you go off the road?' " Austin says. "But it got easier as we went."

Austin and Mike decide to sit together again, just as they did on the way to Florida.

"We're both like each other's lucky charm," Austin says.

APRIL 22

Coach James Grandey returns to the dugout for the first time since the crash, but an eight-run sixth inning by Anderson College sinks the Beavers. They lose 11-7.

Searching for the right words

Grandey, who spent two weeks in an Atlanta hospital, no longer has his jaw wired shut. His crutches are gone, his injured right foot encased in a protective boot.

His orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Allen McDonald III, says the foot will need another four months to heal.

His psychological wounds are another story. Grandey has tried to help his players focus on baseball, but admits he sometimes gropes for the right words.

"I don't know how you tell an 18- to 22-year-old how to overcome the loss of a best friend or a roommate or a teammate," he says.

Grandey's players have noticed a mellower side of their fiery coach.

"I think what's tough on him is really not being able to let us have it," says A.J. Ramthun, the injured second baseman from Springfield who became the face of the team after going on CNN six hours after the crash. "Sometimes we'll just come out of a really rough inning and you can tell he just wants to come up and, not so much yell at you, but get you jump-started, and he just can't.

"He just doesn't have the pep that he would normally have before the accident."

APRIL 24

Eight weeks after Mike Ramthun had his left leg pinned under the Bluffton team bus in Atlanta, he is inserted into the game against St. Francis College. Bluffton loses, 15-9.

'I hate lefties'

"You're going in," Grandey says late in the game against St. Francis College.

"This is it," Mike thinks as he sprints to a spot inside the left-field fence where the banners of his fallen teammates hang.

Mike has been waiting for this moment for two years. After catching the bottom of the ninth inning in one game as a freshman at Marietta College, he took a year off school and worked at the Gordon Food Service factory in Springfield. When his brother, A.J., decided to play baseball and football at Bluffton, Mike followed, working his way into the starting lineup and the cleanup position in the batting order.

Then came Atlanta. Mike was still trapped under with the bus when paramedics carried teammate Scott Harmon to an ambulance, only to emerge a few minutes later with his body covered by a white sheet. Hospitalized for five days, Mike returned to Bluffton and underwent physical rehabilitation exercises for almost four hours a day. His doctor and the Bluffton athletic training staff cleared him to play the day before the game.

He's not thinking about all that as he steps to the plate in the bottom of the sixth inning against St. Francis left-hander Matt Degitz. He's thinking, "I hate lefties."

After letting an outside curve ball go by, Mike slaps the next pitch past Degitz for a base hit.

"It feels good, doesn't it?" first base coach Jason Moore says.

"You can't even imagine," Mike says.

Four weeks ago, Mike rode a scooter to Bluffton's first game. But after he is given the steal sign by third base coach Todd Miller, he is on his own. Nothing will get him to second base except speed. He doesn't even notice when Miller waves off the steal sign.

As the ball leaves the pitcher's hand, Mike charges hard off his left leg — the one he injured — then pushes with his right. Left, right, left, right. Twelve feet from the bag he begins a headfirst slide. Probably a little early. Definitely early. He hears the throw zip past his head.

"Oh, crap," he thinks.

He looks up at the umpire.

"Safe!"

MAY 1

Before Bluffton's final home game against Defiance College, university President James Harder announces that the school will build a memorial to the crash victims, using contributions from church groups, sports teams and college students from across the country. In a game called after six innings because of lightning, Bluffton wins 11-3.

Clinging to memories

Everyone touched by the Bluffton bus crash wants closure.

It is not always easy to find.

When Zach Arend was in Grady Memorial Hospital, his doctors told Dana and Caroline Arend that he would improve his chances of coming out of his coma if he got past the first 72 hours. The family was elated when the deadline passed, but he died a few days later.

The reports had seemed so positive. Then he was gone.

"It was just too much trauma to his body," Caroline says.

Zach, a 6-foot-3 pitcher who was the most valuable player at Paulding High School, used to come home from Bluffton every weekend, and when he showed up he often wanted to play catch with his dad.

"We'd go out in the yard and he'd show me his new pitches," Dana said. "I'd tell him, 'Zachary, I can't catch you anymore. I'm getting too old.' "

The week Zach was in Grady, the Arends never left his side, talking to him, singing to him, holding his hand.

"We thank God every day we had that week," Caroline says. "Not everyone gets that."

The Arends have leaned on their faith, on their belief that God had another plan for their son. But Dana admits there are days when he just wants to crawl into bed and not come out.

"A big part of us died in Atlanta, too," he said. "It's something we'll never be able to replace."

Like other parents who lost a son in the Bluffton crash, Geneva Williams clings to her memories of Tyler, the budding rap artist who had his own record label. Sometimes she swears she hears his footsteps, his laugh.

"I still think he's coming into the house or jump on my bed to wake me up," she says.

But she also is angry that the parents haven't been told more about the cause of the crash.

"These boys shouldn't have died like this," she says. "These boys shouldn't have been hurt. My thing was that he (Jerry Niemeyer) didn't realize he was on an off-ramp. I give him that. But they can't tell me what he was doing. How do you know what he was doing?"

Kim Askins, Cody Holp's mother, shares some of that anger toward the driver.

"An interstate doesn't go up like a ramp. You ought to know that," she says. "These are the people you're giving your precious cargo to. Make sure they're safe on their trip. Why did they not know? It's hard."

Askins visits her son's grave every day — sometimes two or three times a day — in an attempt to find meaning in her son's death.

One day it came in a letter.

Bluffton baseball player Matt Ferguson wrote how he and Cody were talking about heaven one day and they wondered, "Is there baseball in heaven and does Jesus play?"

Cody, who always seemed to be able to lighten any mood, said, "Do you think I could strike him out?"

MAY 5

Bluffton loses to Transylvania University, 11-5, ending its season with a 5-19 record. In the last inning, Austin Gray, who has had just two hits during the season, comes to bat as a pinch-hitter and doubles in two runs.

A long road ahead

Tim Berta's recovery continues slowly.

Before the Bluffton crash, the biology major was just a few months from graduating to what he hoped would be a career as a nurse anesthetist.

Now he is learning the most rudimentary of tasks: walking, speaking, even moving his head from side to side.

In mid-May, he said his first word since the accident: "Ouch."

A few days later, a doctor coaxed him to say "pizza" by promising to buy him one — cheese only.

His dad joined in, whispering to Tim, "Say, 'Red Lobster.' "

Tim then did something for the first time since the accident: He laughed.

On June 2, surgeons reattached the part of Tim's skull that was removed. The section had been frozen while doctors waited for the swelling in his brain to go down and for his overall health to improve.

So far, the operation appears to have been a success. On June 21, the first day of summer, Tim was released from the hospital, becoming the last of the Bluffton survivors to come home.

Although they are overjoyed, Karen Berta admits the homecoming has been an adjustment. For the Bertas, the crash didn't just change their life. It took it over.

"We are trying to set a routine," Karen says. "Right now, it's all attention on Tim."

His food takes special preparation, he can't walk without assistance and the Bertas, who have been on family medical leave since the accident, can't stay off work forever.

Robb Berta returned to his job as a mail carrier on June 25, and Karen plans to go back to her finance job later this month. She knows it will be tough tearing herself away from her son.

"We need to work," Karen says. "We're not rich people. I carry the benefits for our other children and myself. I'm just not sure if I can go back, if I'll get there and be able to work."

Doctors have determined that Tim, who did not speak for several weeks after the accident, did no permanent damage to his vocal chords. And his speech has started to take off.

"It's getting better every day," Karen says. "It's all starting to click."

Doctors predict that in six months to a year, Tim will fully regain his speech.

While Tim's intellect is rapidly returning, his body moves at a slower pace. He faces a lot of therapy to recover full movement in his left arm and hand.

"He has to work hard just to make a fist," Karen says. "He doesn't remember how far he's come since the accident. He only remembers how he was before the accident. That's the yardstick he's using. We're trying to make him understand how far he has come."

Tim has no memory of the accident, and as he began to heal, he wanted answers. "Was I the worst one hurt?" he asked one day.

He now knows what the rest of the world knows: that five of his teammates are gone. What he doesn't know — what no one knows — is the invisible toll that awful morning in Atlanta had on the ones who walked away.

"Everyone on the bus when it crashed is going to have issues," Karen Berta says. "Maybe they were able to walk away, but they're still going to have issues to deal with."

"They heard things," her husband adds. "They saw things that boys shouldn't have to hear or see."

Honoring his teammates

A.J. Ramthun can't shake the memory of his friend Cody Holp whooshing by him "like someone swinging a baseball bat."

Death's touch, just beyond his grasp.

On St. Patrick's Day, two weeks after the crash, A.J. got his first tattoo. Just below the broken left collarbone he injured in the crash are the five initials of his fallen teammates, hemmed inside a starkly drawn cross.

Their placement isn't random.

As A.J. looks down on his arm, Zach Arend is on the left side of the cross.

"He was always on my left side when he tutored me in biology," A.J. explains. "He was the reason I'm passing biology."

David Betts is on the top of the cross.

"David Betts just always worked harder than everybody, so that stood out. That's why I put him on top."

Scott Harmon is on the right side.

"Scott Harmon was always everybody's right-hand man. If you really got in trouble, you could call Scott."

Tyler Williams is on the bottom "because he was so low-key. He was taking life easy."

And in the middle of the cross are the initials CEH.

A.J. saved the center for his friend Cody Holp.

"Cody has to be in the middle," A.J. says. "He was like one of my brothers."

After the horror in Atlanta, life goes on. Bluffton even played baseball again. But the worst scars from that day are the ones no one can see.

Like A.J. Ramthun's tattoo, those are permanent.