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Azusa Pacific Professor Reflects on 20 Year Old Accident

Posted December 2, 2008

  • 20 years later, Covina survivor reflects on nation's worst DUI crash.

    The Rev. Allen Tennison sits in the sanctuary at Covina Assembly of God Church on June 17. The Covina resident is a survivor of the nation's worst DUI accident, a crash that killed 27 people.

    Just over 20 years ago, Allen Tennison awoke with a start.

    The time was 10:55 p.m., and a scream had pierced through the then-15-year-old's deep slumber.

    One of 67 passengers from the youth group of First Assembly of God Church in Radcliff, Ky., traveling home after an all-day outing to Kings Island amusement park in Ohio, Tennison was unaware that just moments before the startling outcry, his school bus had come skidding to a halt on Interstate 71.

    With his head resting on the seat-back in front of him, the teen hadn't felt the jolt of the bus as it collided with a Toyota pickup truck driven by Larry Mahoney, a drunken driver who unknowingly had been heading the wrong way in I-71's southbound lane.

    "When I jumped up, behind me was an open emergency door," Tennison, now a Covina resident and Azusa Pacific University professor, recalled in an interview less than a month after the 20th anniversary of the crash. "At that point, I just remember a rush of people behind me, and I went out the door."

    In that instant on May 14, 1988, Tennison became a survivor of what would come to be known as the worst DUI accident in U.S. history, a grim superlative earned by a wreck that killed 27 people — three adults, the rest children. Dozens others suffered injuries ranging from minor to severely critical burns.

    "This was the nation's deadliest drunk driving crash," said Karolyn Nunnallee, whose 10-year-old daughter Patty was the youngest  person killed in the disaster.  "It's  a record we really want to hold, and it's a record that all of us involved would never want broken."

    While the impact of the pickup was not fatal, according to an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, the force of the collision ruptured the bus's gas tank and set it ablaze.

    "The kids had succumbed to smoke," Tennison said, "and they started collapsing between the eighth and 10th rows creating a wall of bodies."

    The son of First Assembly of God's head pastor Don Tennison and wife Martha, Allen Tennison had been seated in the third row from the back. As he fled out the emergency exit and away from the wreckage, he wondered if the chaos around him was really happening.

    "I had a friend who was seated behind me," he said, "and I looked up and said, 'Larry, am I dreaming?' ... I just saw all this blood coming from his face, and I was just asking him over and over, 'Am I dreaming?'"

    "That's when I turned around and I saw the bus was in flames."

    At the time, Tennison said he never suspected that so many of his friends would never make it off the bus, and it wasn't until the next day, a Sunday, that the magnitude of the crash began to hit home.

    "(The church) parking lot was full with news vans," he said. "I saw some national networks, and then I knew this was not a local accident. This was a national tragedy."

    As the body count began to rise, the feeling of shock quickly faded into grief.

    "Throughout the day in the news, the number (of dead) kept getting larger," Tennison said, "from 13, to 17, to 20 — and finally that there's 27."

    "It was devastating. You're dealing with death for the first time, and it's huge. ... You don't even know who to focus on missing."

    In the midst of the nightmare, however, signs of hope started to sprout, especially in the outpouring of support from the community, which began almost instantly after the crash.

    At the scene of the accident, traffic stopped. A registered nurse, who happened to be driving by, pulled over and brought with her blankets from her car. Tractor-trailers gathered together, using their headlights to illuminate a makeshift landing pad for emergency helicopters to land on the interstate.

    "Everyone pulled everything they had to do whatever they could," Tennison said.

    When Tennison's father, the church pastor, was overwhelmed by requests to officiate at funeral services — at one point, leading more than a dozen in one weekend — Army leaders from nearby Fort Knox sent a military transport, so he could make it to a burial in Missouri, where one congregant's wife and two daughters were to be interred.

    "He had lost his entire family (in the crash)," Tennison said. "But when they were buried, that church showed up. It's just a tremendous show of support."

    For many whose lives were impacted by the crash, the church fellowship proved a place to turn to in their time of need.

    "This church becomes its own support system," Tennison said, "full of people who know what everyone else is going through."

    In fact, such support is something experts say is crucial to coping with death or loss.

    "If you are with others who have either experienced the same event or a similar event that you have, there is a comfort in being with people who have been through what you have," said Debra Manners, executive vice president of programs with Pasadena-based Hathaway-Sycamores Child and Family Services. "You can help each other with a mutual exchange of support."

    In the process of grieving, Tennison said he also struggled with survivor's guilt.

    "You always think about your actions that night," he said. "You try to plan a better response to something you can't go back to."

    For years after the accident, Tennison said he often found himself wondering if he could have saved a life or prevented injury had he acted differently before escaping the bus.

    It's a common response to trauma tied closely to post-traumatic stress disorder, said Joan Cochran, executive director of the Center for Grief and Loss for Children, a program of Hathaway-Sycamores Child and Family Services.

    "Several years down the line, they are still re-living the image of what happened," Cochran said.

    Ultimately, Tennison said, it was a sense of being grounded by faith that helped him make peace with the horrific events of the past.

    "The only thing that got me through was just knowing that God can handle everything I was going through," he said.

    Nunnallee said she, too, turned to faith after the death of her daughter Patty.

    "The Lord allowed me to have her for 10 years," she said, "but because of my belief, when I die, I will spend eternity with her."

    The Fort Meade, Fla., resident also took on an activist role as a crusader against drunken driving and for improving the safety of school buses, efforts she launched in memory of her daughter, who she said was focused and driven at a young age. Nunnallee spent 11 years serving on a national level with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, even becoming the organization's seventh president, serving from 1998-99.

    The course of time has brought healing, Nunnallee said, and with healing, forgiveness.

    "Forgiveness means I will hold no malice," she said. "It doesn't mean I forgot what Mr. Mahoney did. ... He didn't drink that night to go out and kill 27 and injure others."

    Tennison spoke similarly on the restorative power of forgiveness.

    "For me, I have a willingness in my heart to forgive the drunk driver," he said. "I can't imagine what life is like for him, and that doesn't mean I don't think it was a serious action."

    "His action resulted in the deaths of 27 people," he added, "but it's because it's so serious that my heart goes out to what he must feel. My prayer is that he does have a relationship with God, that he knows he can be different."

    In the wake of the bus crash, Tennison said his own connection to God grew stronger.

    "Suddenly my life looked more like the world as it's described in the Bible," Tennison said. "People are genuinely hurting, and horrible things happen, and yet God is there. I finally had an experience that matched my faith."

    Over time, he realized God was calling him to a life of faithful leadership as a minister.

    He attended Evangel University in Springfield, Mo., and went on to receive his master's degree at Asbury Theological Seminary near Lexington, Ky.

    "I had really gotten hungrier for knowledge and education," Tennison said. "I had just touched the tip of the iceberg of what I could know about my faith, about the Bible, about my own Christian tradition."

    In 1997, that hunger carried him to California and to Pasadena's Fuller Theological Seminary, where he studied under preeminent Pentecostal scholars and, in 2006, completed his doctorate in historical theology.

    Upon arriving to the West Coast, Tennison also joined the congregation at Covina Assembly of God, and he began working and ministering at the San Bernardino Road church within two months. Today, he serves as an associate pastor and as director of the Covina Institute of Ministry, an ordination school for local Assemblies of God ministers.

    Tennison is also a faculty member at Azusa Pacific University, where he has taught since 2001 and is now serving as a visiting scholar of church history.

    With the underpinnings of his faith strengthened in the aftermath of childhood tragedy, Tennison said his story carries a message of hope for those struggling in the darkness of loss.

    "A life with Christ cannot be overcome by anything else," Tennison said. "You have a hope as a Christian that, not only can you make it on a day-to-day basis, but that even death itself is temporary. I made it through because I had that hope."