1 Killed, 21 Injured in School Bus Accident on I-77 in Chester County, SC

Chester County, SC — April 17, 2025, One child was killed and 21 were injured in a school bus accident around 2:00 P.M. on I-77.

An investigation is underway following a school bus accident that resulted in the death of a child and injured twenty-one others during the afternoon hours of April 17th. According to official reports, a school bus had left a field trip and was traveling on Interstate 77 in the southbound lanes near exit 55, when the bus suffered a tire blowout causing the vehicle to lose control and strike a guardrail before overturning.

When first responders arrived on the scene, they found that a 13-year-old boy had sustained fatal injuries and was pronounced deceased, while twenty-one others sustained injuries and they were transported to the hospital for treatment. At this time there has been no further information released from the accident, including the severity o f the injuries sustained by the other occupants on board, however this is an ongoing investigation and more details may be released by authorities in the future.

Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman

When people hear that a tire blowout led to a crash involving a school bus, it’s easy to assume the event was simply a matter of bad luck. But having handled similar cases for over 30 years, I’ve learned that blowouts almost never happen without someone, somewhere, dropping the ball.

What makes this kind of crash especially complicated is how many different people and companies may have had a hand in the events leading up to it. There’s a common belief that if a tire fails, the blame must lie with the driver or the road conditions. But tires don’t just explode without a reason. Most of the time, the real issue comes down to who should have caught the problem before it became deadly.

Drivers are expected to inspect their tires before they hit the road. That includes checking tire pressure, looking for worn spots, and knowing when a tire has outlived its usefulness. But a pre-trip inspection can only catch so much. If a driver wasn’t trained properly or didn’t have the tools to do the inspection the right way, that’s not just on them—that’s on the people who put them in that situation.

The company responsible for the bus plays a big role, too. Did they follow the right maintenance schedule? Did they check the tires before allowing the trip to happen? If corners were cut to save time or money, that kind of shortcut can lead to exactly this kind of result. And if that’s the case, we’re not looking at an unfortunate accident—we’re looking at negligence.

There’s also the question of the tires themselves. If the tire was defective from the start, the manufacturer may bear responsibility. I’ve handled cases where a tire that looked perfectly fine to the naked eye turned out to have a hidden defect that could only be discovered through testing in a lab. That’s why in serious crashes like this one, investigators shouldn’t stop at just a visual inspection—they need a full forensic look.

This crash should raise one big question for everyone looking into it: Have we gathered every piece of evidence available before deciding who is at fault? That includes not just photos from the scene, but things like maintenance records, purchase histories for the tire, and even the tire’s recall status. If those records aren’t reviewed, then the investigation may only be scratching the surface.

In my view, crashes that involve tire blowouts almost never begin at the moment the tire fails. They begin weeks or even months earlier, during inspections that didn’t happen, maintenance that was skipped, or poor decisions made behind a desk. Getting to the bottom of what caused this crash means going beyond the guardrail and the overturned bus and digging into what went wrong long before anyone got on board.