Notre Dame's fatal bus crash was only the start for Haley Scott DeMaria

Some 16 years after fatal bus crash, the former Notre Dame swimmer tells of her harrowing recovery process from a spinal injury in her book 'What Though the Odds.'

Bill Dwyre

May 20, 2008

ANNAPOLIS, Md. -- By all accounts, including hers, Haley Scott was just an average college swimmer. No top national times, no Olympic moments.

She's Haley Scott DeMaria now, suburban housewife and happily married mother of two. She wrote a book about herself, to be released June 2, so there has to be something more to the story.

There is. Much more.

A little past midnight in the wee hours of Jan. 24, 1992, Scott, an 18-year-old freshman, and her Notre Dame swim team were on the Indiana Toll Road in a chartered bus. They had competed against Northwestern in Chicago, and were four miles from their South Bend exit. They had just finished watching a Julia Roberts' movie, "Dying Young."

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It had been a warm day in wintry northern Indiana. Scott DeMaria laughs about that now. The Irish had recruited her from Xavier College Prep School in Phoenix and brought her in one day in February when the temperature was 60 degrees. That happens about every 75 years.

"I thought, hey, I can handle this," she recalls.

The warmth that January day, however, turned cold and snowy that night, and the snow turned quickly to ice. Scott DeMaria recalls the bus passing a car, then veering back to the right lane. "I thought we were exiting," she says.

Instead, the bus skidded on the ice, left the road, slid sideways down an embankment and, when a wheel hit a concrete culvert, turned over.

Two team members, freshmen Meghan Beeler and Colleen Hipp, were thrown from the bus and killed when it landed on top of them. Scott DeMaria was slammed around inside and ended up next to a window that either popped open or was blown out. She pulled herself out and ended up on her back in the snow.

"I remember telling everybody two things, over and over," she says. "I was cold and my back hurt."

She was dressed in standard Dress Code A for Notre Dame traveling women's teams, cotton skirt and top. She stayed like that, on her back, in the snow, for an hour. Most likely, that is why she is walking today. She had no idea she had broken her spine. The term "paraplegic" hadn't occurred to her, even though it now defined her.

"I noticed when they finally lifted me onto a board for the ambulance, I couldn't move my legs," she says. "But one of the girls who stayed with me reminded me that I had been on my back in the snow for an hour, so I was probably just numb. I'm sure that's what I wanted to hear, so I accepted it."

Less than four hours later, Scott DeMaria was signing a consent form for doctors to perform back surgery. Her parents were on their way from Phoenix. But doctors said her best chance for recovery was having surgery quickly, before swelling on her injured spine, held somewhat in check by her hour in the snow, could build.

"I said, 'Well, what are we waiting for?' "

After surgery, she was told that something, some movement or feeling, needed to happen in the next 48 hours. Nothing happened, except for visits from doctors and nurses, preparing her for life in a wheelchair.

"I told my mom, it was going to be all right," says Scott DeMaria. "I told her I still had my mind. I could teach from a wheelchair."

A week later, as her father sat bedside, her right big toe moved. As he watched, it did it again. "I squeezed his hand," she says, "and pretty soon, the room was full of happy nurses and doctors."

Doctors told her she would be in the hospital for a year, that her best-case scenario was walking with braces. Three weeks after the accident, she stood with a walker. Two weeks after that, she walked with a cane.

Scott DeMaria went to Phoenix for spring break. Then, incredibly, she returned to Notre Dame for the rest of the spring semester. She had two rods in her back, holding her spine in place, and was in a torso body cast. She got around with a cane and a golf cart.

"I was the only non-football player to get one," she says.

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Notre Dame's fatal bus crash was only the start for Haley Scott DeMaria

Some 16 years after fatal bus crash, the former Notre Dame swimmer tells of her harrowing recovery process from a spinal injury in her book 'What Though the Odds.'

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Notre Dame's fatal bus crash was only the start for Haley Scott DeMaria

Some 16 years after fatal bus crash, the former Notre Dame swimmer tells of her harrowing recovery process from a spinal injury in her book 'What Though the Odds.'

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