But on Tuesday night, Busby’s world began to come unraveled. She got into a quarrel with the man she intermittently shared the apartment with. “You don’t love me anymore … you’re cheating,” she shouted, according to neighbors, as slammed doors reverberated through the complex. The next morning, around 6 a.m., her father came to take Busby and the boys to a friend’s house. He was gassing up his old yellow Cadillac at a Shell station on a crowded commercial strip, near a Wal-Mart and a car dealership, when Busby got out of the car. “Where are you going?” her father asked. Busby said she was going to the store. Instead, she took the boys by the hand and walked halfway across a freeway overpass. She dragged her sons over the rail, and then hurled herself over after them.
Busby and her children plummeted 22 feet or more onto the concrete in the fast lane of morning rush-hour traffic on Interstate 30 heading toward downtown Dallas. One driver mistook the crumpled bodies dropping from the sky for bags of garbage dumped onto the roadway. Motorists swerved and slammed on the brakes before calling 911. One of the boys landed on his side, shattering an arm. He rolled onto his hands and knees, crouching with his eyes transfixed in terror at the oncoming traffic.
Miraculously, everyone appears to have survived the fall without life-threatening injuries. Traffic had slowed to about 35mph when she threw her children over the railing, and neither mother nor children are thought to have been run over by passing vehicles—though one of the boys might have been grazed, said Dallas Police Sgt. Gil Cerda. The incident could have caused a domino effect on the freeway and a chain of potentially fatal accidents, but there were no collisions or deaths. “We consider that very, very lucky,” he said.
Busby’s father, perhaps thinking they were all dead, had left after discovering what his daughter had done. He later turned up at her side at the hospital. The boys were sobbing but able to speak to paramedics, who rushed them by ambulance to a local children’s hospital where they are being treated for possible internal injuries and are in stable condition, police said. Busby was arrested from her bedside on suspicion of two counts of attempted capital murder, she is still in the process of being formally charged, police said Thursday.
This isn’t the first time Dallas has been riveted by a gruesome freeway overpass incident. A few years ago, a young man pushed his girlfriend off the top of Dallas’s “High Five” interchange before jumping himself. In a city of this size, such events do happen from time to time but are no means common, Sergeant Cerda said. The question everyone asks afterward, but are rarely able to answer, is why?
Police are continuing to investigate the circumstances leading up to Busby’s desperate actions. Her family and neighbors said it was clear that she was under incredible stress, but they never thought she would do something so drastic. Busby had been previously arrested for assault, burglary, criminal trespassing and assaulting a public servant. (She was convicted in each case—save the assault involving a public servant, which is pending.) In 2001, she was arrested and later sentenced to a year in jail after she found another woman in her boyfriend’s house and attacked her with a knife.
She could be affectionate and attentive to her children, inquiring about the names of their friends’ parents. But local child-welfare officials gave her parenting classes after they found the children dirty and unkempt. The children were also placed in foster care for a few months after authorities arrested and convicted her during a domestic-violence incident with a previous boyfriend.
Busby’s new neighbors say they saw her as a caring but overwhelmed parent. Christopher Bickham, 27, said “she really seemed like a nice person. She was a single mama, going through single mama problems. I knew her life was stressed. She was looking for a job, looking for a babysitter. From what I could tell, she wasn’t a bad parent, but she must have hit the breaking point and thought, well, we’ll all go to heaven. It is horrible. I can’t justify what she did, but I can understand the mind frame. She also tried to commit suicide, so maybe in her mind she would have been doing the best thing for her kids.”
His girlfriend, Marquita Henderson, a 20-year-old mother of three young children, took a sharper view. “I understand the pressures. But she didn’t have to do that. To hurt her own, that’s crazy,” Henderson said. “The fire station is less than a block over. They would have put her kids somewhere safe if she thought she was going to hurt herself. Really, she ruined her life and her kids. She scarred them deeply. They didn’t deserve that. I’m going to pray for them all.”
None of Busby’s relatives could be reached for comment Wednesday night; nor could the man she sometimes lived with. A female cousin told The Dallas Morning News that Busby complained that she had trouble keeping a boyfriend because of the kids and that she once said, “I can’t take this. I just feel like killing all of us.” Busby’s sister, Monica Busby, was sobbing in the arms of a friend Wednesday morning when she told a local television news reporter “she wouldn’t let nobody help her with the kids, she’d rather throw them off the damn bridge than let somebody help her, that’s what I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes these incidents, they’re unexplainable,” Sergeant Cerda said.
