The quiet suburb of Glenwood was anything but Friday morning as a hijacked school bus plowed through its main streets, bashed into cars and landed in a front yard, its out-of-control driver halted with two fatal shots to the head from a police officer.
What drove Ronald Newsome, the regular driver of the bus, into such a rage that he led police on a wild chase from South Holland, striking numerous vehicles and allegedly trying to run down cops, isn’t yet known.
And at a news conference Friday afternoon, South Holland police declined to comment on witness statements that Newsome had a gun and fired at police before he was killed.
The police chief’s official statement makes no mention of him being armed.
The phone number listed at Newsome’s address in the 12100 block of South Wallace Street was disconnected.
Newsome was pronounced dead at St. James Hospital in Chicago Heights on Friday morning, a spokesman for the Cook County medical examiner’s office said. He died from multiple gun shot wounds, a spokesman said.
South Holland Police Chief Warren Millsaps told reporters one of his officers fired two shots at the bus as it lurched toward him, instantly killing Newsome.
Witnesses said it appeared that the driver turned left onto a lawn, then tried to escape on foot. Construction workers redoing the sewers along West Main Street in Glenwood witnessed the chase and said Newsome started firing shots and officers returned fire. They said they heard between five and eight gunshots in quick succession.
Kevin Wolfe, 45, was part of the crew improving sewers along Glenwood-Dyer Road. He was heading back to the job site from a nearby quarry when the bus flew by.
“I was coming from the quarry, and he came darting through and actually hit two cars, and the cops were chasing him,” Wolfe said from his truck. “All of a sudden when he lost control of the thing … we saw him crash. And as soon as he got out, he jumped out and
started running. They got him right as he was coming out of the bus. We heard the shots fire, ding, ding, ding, ding.”
Millsaps said officers had ordered Newsome out of the stopped bus but he turned to the left in an attempt to hit the officers standing in front of the bus.
The chief would not identify the South Holland officer who shot Newsome and would not answer questions about whether Newsome had a gun.
“Anytime you have a bus fleeing from police at 65 miles per hour, it’s a deadly weapon,” he said. “The officers used appropriate force necessary to stop him.”
Newsome, a First Student Transportation Co. employee, took the bus from the company’s South Holland lot about 7:30 a.m., angered when his boss told him he could not drive because he was behaving badly, according to a company spokeswoman.
No children were aboard, but a monitor hired by First Student was on the bus. Her identity wasn’t released by the company or police. When the bus stopped at the end of what must have been a terrifying ride for her, she ran into the Dennis’ Glenwood Marathon gas station, mechanics said.
“She ran in here after that happened,” said mechanic Patrick Connolly, of South Holland. “Nobody got her name; she was all upset.”
His colleague, Darrein DeMario, 25, already was working when “five or six” shots rang out.
“I don’t know who shot first,” DeMario said. “I heard (the driver) shot first.”
The neighbor, whose house on West Main Street nearly was hit by the bus, was out of town for work, Connolly said. The bus’s grill stopped just a few feet shy of the blue painted clapboard home squarely on the front lawn in a yard quickly cordoned off with yellow police tape.
“He’s going to have a fit, man,” Connolly said.
The village of about 9,000 people is hardly the “Mayberry” it was 50 years ago, said 61-year-old lifelong resident Ted Lyons, but police chases and shootings still come as a shock.
He watched a little of the chaos but mostly minded his business over a cup of coffee outside his house several doors down from the scene, avoiding the fray. Why would anyone want to speak to him, he wondered.
“It’s all down there,” he said, pointing to the street choked with debris. “I didn’t steal the damn bus.”
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