Several agencies responded to a school bus crash in Chester County on April 17 that left a Lexington County middle school student dead.

CHESTER — The silence is what sticks out to Megan Probert about the crash.

Probert, a 27-year-old special education teacher at Pine Ridge Middle School in West Columbia, wasn’t supposed to be on the school bus that day. She was asked less than 24 hours earlier to fill in for another teacher.

The eight graders she was accompanying were calm as they rode home after a field trip to the NASCAR Hall of Fame , in Charlotte, N.C., that early afternoon of April 17.

The bus was carrying 35 students and three adults, trailed by two other buses from Lexington Two school district.

Probert had her feet propped up on the seat when she heard the front driver’s side tire pop . Seconds later, the bus was filled with the screech of metal on metal as the bus hit the guardrail along Interstate 77, turning over and shattering its glass windows.

She had only an instant to brace her body between the seats before her window hit the pavement. Two kids sitting across the aisle landed on top of her. Somehow, she didn’t hit the ground.

In the aftermath, all she remembers is how quiet it was.

“I don’t remember the kids screaming. I think we all were in shock, like, 'Oh my God, what just happened,'” Probert said. “It was all just so fast.”

Fourteen-year-old Atzin Muñoz Saligan was dozing off toward the back of the bus. He sat in front of Jose Gonzalez Linares who, like most of the students, was asleep.

Jolted awake by the noise, Atzin clung to the backpack rail on instinct. It saved him from falling to the pavement below, but Atzin said Jose didn’t wake up in time to brace himself.

He saw Jose lying on the pavement with injuries from the broken glass, and he started to panic.

“Somebody call 911. Someone needs to help him,” Atzin said, according to his mother, Blanca Saligan. “Check on him, check on him. He’s dead. He's dead.”

For a moment, Probert was frozen.

She remembers looking up and seeing a student bleeding profusely from the head. She didn't immediately think to open the vehicle's top hatch.

But thanks to a bus evacuation drill a week prior, the kids sprung into action. A student reached over to open the roof hatch and began pulling others out.

That drew Probert back into reality.

She started pushing the kids closest to her out of the hatch, until one of her students in the back called out to her, saying he was stuck. She crawled into the back, pulling him and a few other students to safety.

When she got out of the bus, she ran over to the boy she had seen bleeding from his head.

“I felt like I was everywhere and nowhere all at once," Probert said. "I think we were just kind of all in shock and in panic."

In one of the buses behind them, Kylen Thomas, 14, watched in horror as his teacher hopped out of the bus, shirtless and bloody. He saw another student pulled out, covered in glass.

He immediately texted his mother, Ashanti Thomas: “Momma the bus flipped.”

At first, Thomas thought her son was joking. Then, she got the crash alert from his iPhone.

“My heart sank,” she said.

Kylen FaceTimed her, flipped the camera around and showed her the bus on its side, smoking.

Thirty seconds later, she was in her car to the prescribed parent-student unification site along I-77. What should have been at least an hourlong drive took her just 45 minutes.

'It was my worst fear coming to life'

Saligan, Atzin's mother, will never forget her son’s desperate, “pitchy” screams when he called her minutes after the bus crash.

Like Thomas, she thought her son was playing a prank on her. It wasn’t until one of the teachers took the phone back from the boy and confirmed the accident that it hit her.

The hourlong drive was agonizing. She was glued to the Pine Ridge Facebook group, refreshing the feed every other second, desperate for any news on her son.

“You just feel like you can't travel fast enough,” Saligan said.

Atzin called her from an ambulance, telling her to meet him at Piedmont Medical Center in Rock Hill.

He was among 37 people from the bus wreck taken to several area hospitals, including three transported by helicopter due to their critical condition.

Jose, 13, was pronounced dead at the scene, from blunt force trauma to the head.

Parents waited at the staging area, at the Shell gas station off Exit 48, to be reunited with their children after a bus carrying a group of Lexington County middle school students crashed on I-77 last week in Chester County. Ashanti Thomas said there was an ambulance there to check out kids from the other two busses, but the kids ran right off the busses into their parent's arms.

The kids on Kylen's bus were brought to meet their parents at the Shell gas station off Exit 48.

Thomas was in “panic mode” until she laid eyes on her son.

“I needed to see him, like physically see him, to make sure that he was OK,” she said. “I think I’m still in shock, because that was one of my fears coming to life.”

There was an ambulance at the gas station, but Thomas said the kids rushed straight into their parents' arms and went home.

The aftermath of shock

Probert, the special ed teacher, has a sore back but otherwise said she was “blessed" to have emerged from the crash with no injuries.

Everyone has since been released from the hospital.

The school district has offered grief counseling for both teachers and students, but Probert said she’s considering getting outside help.

“I’ve thought about taking a break from teaching, so this might be a little bit of a sign to do that," Probert said. "Mentally, I’m not sure I’m prepared to handle it.”

As for the kids, Probert said she expects it will take a while for the full weight of what they went through to set in.

“I can’t imagine being 13 or 14, and going through something so traumatic and being so brave.”

Ashanti Thomas said her "heart sank" when her 14-year-old son, Kylen, texted her that one of the busses on his field trip had flipped.