A BUS driver who crashed and injured six people at Belmont North, including one man who will never walk again, has pleaded guilty to four charges including dangerous driving occasioning grievous bodily harm.
Vladan Wally Talevski, 62, of Clarence Town, had been having micro sleeps while driving the bus, and showing other signs of fatigue in the minutes before he lost control.
CCTV footage from the bus shows that at 3.11am, on November 13, 2022, he was rubbing his face, falling asleep, opening and closing his eyes, shaking his head, shrugging his shoulders, playing with his glasses, taking big deep breaths, yawning and tugging on his jumper sleeves, and removed his glasses for about 25 seconds.
He was driving along Wommara Avenue towards Belmont North when he failed to navigate a right hand bend. He collided with a cement barrier, which caused the bus to become airborne before it rolled onto its side and landed in a ditch.
In an agreed statement of facts tendered in Newcastle Local Court today (Wednesday, April 3), police say he was only woke up by the noise of the crash and had taken no apparent evasive action.
While he was able to get himself out of the bus, some of his passengers were ejected out through broken windows.
Talevski told police at the scene that he had been feeling 'drowsy'.
A man sitting in the back seat said the bus had kept hitting potholes during the trip, describing it as 'something he had never experienced before'.
He was ejected from the third window and ended up under the bus.
He was airlifted to Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital where he was treated for a spinal cord injury. He now suffers from paraplegia with no feeling below his nipples. He also suffered three broken ribs, a punctured lung, cuts to his chin and head and chipped teeth.
Another man, who was travelling with a friend, said the driver was 'straight lining and not staying in his lane'. He felt the bus increase its speed as it went downhill before the front of the bus lifted. He was thrown into the roof and knocked unconscious, suffering five broken ribs, a punctured lung, four fractures at the base of the spine, and bruising.
A woman who was travelling with a friend was also knocked unconscious, broke a finger and wore a neck brace for six weeks afterwards.
Her friend said he found himself face down in a ditch, and heard the driver say, "I just made a mistake'.
Samuel Hayward-Powell, a Newcastle hotel worker who suffered minor injuries, said he was on his way home from a night shift at 3.45am when the bus he was travelling on left the road and flipped, landing in a creek bed on Wommara Avenue.
"I was playing a game on my phone, when it felt like we hit a pothole," the 24-year-old man said.
"There was a whole lot of rumbling and crashing and the bus just flipped. I was sitting in front of the back doors and I went over the metal railing. The guy who was sitting at the back of the bus was across from me and we just looked at each other like 'what the f***'."
The bus had been travelling westbound when it hit a concrete wall and overturned. According to nearby residents the crash made a "big bang" like a "bomb going off".
Mr Hayward-Powell said residents came rushing out of their homes and began helping the the men stuck under the wreckage.
Talevski pleaded guilty to one count of dangerous driving occasioning grievous bodily harm, three counts of cause bodily harm by wilful neglect.
Three other counts of cause bodily harm by misconduct or neglect will be taken into account when he is sentenced in the Newcastle District Court where he is next to appear on April 10.
