Police Storm School Bus, Kill Hijacker

A heavily armed police SWAT team stormed a school bus in Miami Beach on Thursday and shot to death a man who had forced the driver and her passengers--11 disabled elementary school students--on a harrowing, 90-minute ride to a restaurant where the hijacker worked as a waiter.

Claiming to have a grudge against the Internal Revenue Service and either a bomb or a weapon in his pocket, the man, identified by police as Catalino (Nick) Sang, 42, was slain outside Joe’s Stone Crab Restaurant as television news crews in helicopters and on the ground sent live pictures of the drama to a national television audience.

With the children and the bus driver still on board, about a dozen flak-jacketed officers surrounded the bus when it arrived at the restaurant and one officer fired a single shot that hit the man, dropping him to the floor of the bus. The bus lurched forward and struck a parked car. After it came to a stop, officers stormed the bus, rushing through the open doorway and firing several more shots into the suspect, according to police.

Fearing that a canister in the man’s possession might be an explosive as he had claimed, the officers immediately dragged the man’s body off the bus and into an alley behind the restaurant as the terrified students and the driver scrambled out the back door of the bus.

The canister turned out to be a portable oxygen tank belonging to one of the children, police said. No weapon was found.

When it was over, the children were taken into the restaurant and given sodas, french fries and ice cream. Seven-year-old Brian Morales called the hijacker “a bad person.”

No serious injuries were reported to the bus driver, 47-year-old Alicia Reyes Chapman, or the stunned and crying students, who ranged from 5 to 11 years old and have a variety of developmental problems, including autism. One child was treated for cuts suffered from glass shattered by the bullets.

“Mrs. Chapman is a hero,” said Dade County schools Supt. Octavio Visiedo. “She drove the bus calmly and clearheadedly throughout the incident.”

And, added Assistant Supt. Henry C. Fraind, “she remembered the one thing we’re all taught as educators: You protect the children.”

The drama began about 8:15 a.m. when Sang reportedly forced his way onto the yellow Dade County school bus behind a mother helping her child aboard for the short ride to Blue Lakes Elementary School, about 15 miles southwest of downtown. On the bus were 13 students, the mother and an adult aide, Dorothy Williams.

In a press conference, Metro Dade Police Director Fred Taylor said that, minutes before boarding the bus, Sang had run out of a nearby church. “He was distraught, yelling,” Taylor said, apparently upset over federal tax liens for more than $15,000.

Sang, a native of the Dominican Republic who had lived legally in the United States since 1984, evidently had no plan to hijack a bus, Taylor said. But seeing the bus stopped as he left the church, he pushed his way aboard, telling Chapman that he was carrying a bomb and would blow up the bus if she did not take him to an IRS office.

Undetected by the hijacker, Chapman said that she switched on the microphone of her radio and concealed it under her leg, thereby enabling the bus dispatcher to learn of the situation. The dispatcher notified police. As police cars began following the bus, then northbound on a freeway, Chapman said the hijacker began demanding a cellular phone so he could talk to police.

He ordered Chapman to stop twice in attempts to find a phone, once directing the mother aboard to get off the bus, walk back and request a phone from a trailing police officer. He did not have one.

During a second stop, the mother, two students and Williams, 47, were allowed to get off for good.

Eventually, with the bus heading east on the Dolphin Expressway to Miami Beach, a Florida State Highway Patrol officer pulled alongside the slow-moving bus and tossed his cellular phone to the hijacker through the open doorway.

Taylor said that Sang talked to a police negotiator but the hijacker’s demands were unclear. “He was not coherent,” Taylor said. “He made several threats.”

With the police radio crackling with reports of the hijacking, local television stations had their helicopters in the air within minutes and thousands watched on television as the slow-moving drama unfolded. By the time the bus reached the causeway over Biscayne Bay to Miami Beach, it was accompanied by a caravan of as many as 50 police cars.

Before the bus arrived at Joe’s, a landmark on South Miami Beach, police had cleared a path for the hijacked vehicle, cordoning off side streets and keeping scores of spectators at a distance.

According to Robert Moorehead, the general manager of Joe’s, Sang was a seven-year employee who abruptly walked off the job Wednesday night.

“I said, ‘Nicky, what’s the matter?’ ” Moorehead recounted. “And he said: ‘I can’t take the pressure. I’m out of here.’

“He was sort of a private guy,” Moorehead said. “I have no idea what this was about.”

Founded in 1913, Joe’s Stone Crab Restaurant is one of the oldest and more famous restaurants in South Florida, where on weekends customers expect to wait in line for two hours or more to be seated. Known for its stone crabs and key lime pie, the restaurant this year underwent a major expansion. It is open only during the winter season, from mid-October to May, when crabs are available.

A waiter who worked with Sang said that the man began acting oddly at work Wednesday, passing around a quotation from “Success,” an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I read it. I didn’t think much of it,” the colleague said. “But perhaps it was foreshadowing.”

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Three hours after their ordeal began, the children were loaded aboard another school bus and returned 15 miles to their school, where anxious parents, summoned by administrators, waited.

Also waiting there was Dennis Chapman, a schoolteacher and the driver’s husband. He reported that his wife, shoeless and limping, suffered a broken toe during the ordeal, adding, “She’s shook up a lot, upset. But she’s fine, thank God.”

“She doesn’t panic easily. She’s really a hero, especially to the kids.”

School Principal Joanne Sterns declared: “The kids are safe and sound. They are not hurt. They are well and happy.”

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.