The Wayward Bus Driver

Working his way through Times Square traffic that afternoon last Dec. 7, Homer Earl Bragg, 40, seemed to be just another Manhattan bus driver, somberly watchful, a little tense, ready to meet the wayfarer's question with a surly reply or surly silence. Then suddenly he began popping up & down in his seat. "You people have been tormenting me!" he shouted to his passengers. "Now I'm going to torment you!" He stepped down on the gas pedal, ran past a red light at Broadway and 43rd Street, piled into a taxicab and a crush of other cars. In all, nine were injured (seven hospitalized), and nine vehicles damaged. Driver Bragg was unhurt, and the police let him go home. That night Bragg took sick, and three days later he died.

Not until last week, when a grand jury handed up its presentment, did Manhattanites learn the why & wherefore of the wayward bus driver. Bragg had been driving buses for the same company for nine years when, in 1945, he was admitted to Rockland State Hospital suffering from paranoid schizophrenia (severe mental derangement, with delusions of persecution). By year's end he was on the job again: the hospital director declared Bragg "sufficiently recovered to operate a motor vehicle." He was confined for another attack in 1949.

Bragg died of a heart attack. An autopsy showed that his heart had been so badly damaged by a previous attack as to make him a danger to the public on this count also. An electrocardiogram should have shown this dangerous damage, but none had been taken.

The grand jury found no violation of law by the bus company or by the licensing authorities. What it did find was a shocking lack of law to protect the riding public. It recommended that New York, now trailing other states in these matters, should provide by law that: 1) every applicant for a license to drive public vehicles must have a thorough physical examination, including an electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram, 2) the examinations must be repeated every year, 3) nobody who has ever had a heart ailment or been diagnosed as psychotic may get such a license.

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