A Bridge Too Far

Life has been a struggle for Khandi Busby, a petite, unemployed single mother of two young boys. She's drifted from job to job and home to home in Dallas, often staying with relatives or boyfriends in between brushes with the law. Her erratic temperament didn't help matters much; acquaintances say she could be sweet and affectionate one moment, then flying into jealous rages. Things seemed to be looking up of late; Busby, 27, had landed in a low-rent apartment complex near a freeway on the eastern fringe of the city. Her sons, Gary Ford, 8, and Derrick Tennison, 6, were "delightful," neighbors said—polite to adults and protective of their new playmates.

But on Tuesday night, Busby's world began to come unraveled. She got into a quarrel with the man she intermittently shared the apartment with. "You don't love me anymore … you're cheating," she shouted, according to neighbors, as slammed doors reverberated through the complex. The next morning, around 6 a.m., her father came to take Busby and the boys to a friend's house. He was gassing up his old yellow Cadillac at a Shell station on a crowded commercial strip, near a Wal-Mart and a car dealership, when Busby got out of the car. "Where are you going?" her father asked. Busby said she was going to the store. Instead, she took the boys by the hand and walked halfway across a freeway overpass. She dragged her sons over the rail, and then hurled herself over after them.

Busby and her children plummeted 22 feet or more onto the concrete in the fast lane of morning rush-hour traffic on Interstate 30 heading toward downtown Dallas. One driver mistook the crumpled bodies dropping from the sky for bags of garbage dumped onto the roadway. Motorists swerved and slammed on the brakes before calling 911. One of the boys landed on his side, shattering an arm. He rolled onto his hands and knees, crouching with his eyes transfixed in terror at the oncoming traffic.

Miraculously, everyone appears to have survived the fall without life-threatening injuries. Traffic had slowed to about 35mph when she threw her children over the railing, and neither mother nor children are thought to have been run over by passing vehicles—though one of the boys might have been grazed, said Dallas Police Sgt. Gil Cerda. The incident could have caused a domino effect on the freeway and a chain of potentially fatal accidents, but there were no collisions or deaths. "We consider that very, very lucky," he said.

Busby's father, perhaps thinking they were all dead, had left after discovering what his daughter had done. He later turned up at her side at the hospital. The boys were sobbing but able to speak to paramedics, who rushed them by ambulance to a local children's hospital where they are being treated for possible internal injuries and are in stable condition, police said. Busby was arrested from her bedside on suspicion of two counts of attempted capital murder, she is still in the process of being formally charged, police said Thursday.

This isn't the first time Dallas has been riveted by a gruesome freeway overpass incident. A few years ago, a young man pushed his girlfriend off the top of Dallas's "High Five" interchange before jumping himself. In a city of this size, such events do happen from time to time but are no means common, Sergeant Cerda said. The question everyone asks afterward, but are rarely able to answer, is why?