Two students suffered minor injuries Tuesday morning after a box truck clipped the rear corner of a stopped school bus in Highlands County, a crash that also drew in a semi-truck moments later. The collision happened shortly after 7:30 a.m. at U.S. Highway 27 and Gould Road in Venus, with 12 students from Lake Placid High School and Lake Placid Middle School riding the bus at the time.
According to Tampa Bay 28, the two injured students suffered only minor injuries, and neither driver involved in the initial impact was hurt. The Highlands County Sheriff's Office reported that the box truck struck the stopped bus's rear corner, triggering the chain of events on the busy highway.
The crash didn't end with that first impact. A semi-truck rear-ended the box truck immediately afterward, according to Fox 13 News, though neither truck driver was hurt in that secondary collision. The outlet's report notes that authorities had not released the identities of the drivers involved or said whether any charges would be filed as of Tuesday.
Florida Highway Patrol Investigating
The Florida Highway Patrol is investigating the crash, per the same account from Tampa Bay 28. No further details on the cause of the collision or the condition of the two injured students have been released.
Florida law carries steep penalties for drivers who fail to stop for a school bus or who pass one on the side where children enter and exit. Those penalties doubled starting January 1, 2021, according to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. It remains unclear whether that statute applies to Tuesday's crash, since officials have not detailed how the box truck came to clip the bus.
A Harsher Lake Placid Crash in 2017
Tuesday's crash is far less severe than a previous Lake Placid school bus wreck. In a 2017 incident on U.S. 27 near Lake Ridge Drive, a semi-truck struck a school bus carrying 39 students while it was stopped to pick up riders, flipping the bus onto its side, Fox 13 News reported at the time. Nineteen students and the bus driver, 59-year-old Selena Hawthorne, were taken to Florida Hospital with non-severe injuries and were later released, while two other students were hurt badly enough to be airlifted to Tampa General Hospital.
No such severe outcome has been reported from Tuesday's crash, and investigators have not yet released a full reconstruction of how the collision unfolded.
