Convicted of possessing cocaine and a crack pipe, Terra Walter had flunked out of two drug-treatment programs and been ordered by a court into a third.
But in 2002, TARC put Walter behind the wheel of a city bus and kept her there, even after she tested positive for cocaine the next year.
Kevin Hable was the managing partner of Wyatt Tarrant & Combs, earning more than $400,000 a year. He was a former top aide to two Kentucky governors, recognized by his peers as one of America’s best lawyers and a healthy, 52-year-old outdoorsman who ran five miles a day.
On Aug. 8, 2005, the lives of Walter and Hable intersected in a violent collision, brought together by what his lawyers call “a mind-boggling set of facts and circumstances.”
On that morning, Walter drove her bus through a stop sign at Trevilian Way and Dundee Road and smashed into the side of Hable’s Jeep Cherokee, according to court depositions from three witnesses and a police report.
Two days later, she testified positive for cocaine; a toxicologist hired by Hable’s attorneys claimed later that the result showed with “reasonable medical certainty” she was high at the time of the accident.
Walter wasn’t injured in the accident. Hable suffered 11 broken ribs, a collapsed lung and a traumatic brain injury from which his doctors say he will never fully recover.
Unable to solve problems or think quickly, he had to give up his legal career and now spends his time at home, alone, unable even to walk his two dogs.
Hable has sued TARC, seeking $6.4 million in lost income and what could turn out to be many times that in punitive damages. Mediation is set for Tuesday and a trial for Feb. 19 in Jefferson Circuit Court.
“Ever since I was about 8 years old, I had a goal of being a lawyer,” he said in a recent court deposition, as he started to cry, according to a court reporter’s notes. “And it really hurts … that I will never be in the future what I was before the wreck.”
His lawyers, Doug Morris and Donald Darby, said Hable did not want to be interviewed or photographed, to protect his privacy.
Walter, fired by TARC three times previously for absenteeism — but reinstated every time — was terminated after the accident.
She also declined to be interviewed, but in a deposition in Hable’s case, she insisted that she had stopped at the intersection and started using drugs again only after the crash.
TARC officials have refused to discuss the accident or Hable’s suit, saying the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
In court papers, it has said its accident-reconstruction expert — a Texas engineer , who has testified in 31 court cases since 2002 — will show that Hable didn’t come to a complete stop and that both he and Walter were driving at about the same speed, between 11 and 17 mph, when their vehicles collided.
But TARC officials have conceded in depositions that Walter should not have been hired under an agency rule barring employment of anyone convicted of a drug or alcohol offense within five years.
“Everybody is entitled to second chance, or even a third chance,” Morris, Hable’s lawyer, said in an interview. “But not driving a bus.”
THE BUS DRIVER
Walter graduated in 1976 from Holy Rosary Academy and later attended Jefferson Community College.
She served as volunteer cheerleader coach at Hazelwood Elementary School, where the youngest of her three children was a student, according to Family Resource Center coordinator Annette Darnell. In a reference letter later made part of court records, Darnell said Walter was a dedicated parent who recruited assistant coaches and helped raise money for uniforms.
But in 1996, Walter was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia, and the next year, possession of cocaine and marijuana.
She pleaded guilty in 1999 and was placed on probation on the condition that she attend the Louisville Central Community Centers’ Second Chance Drug Program. In the spring of 2000, she tested positive four times and was sent to the Jefferson Alcohol and Drug Abuse Center and ordered to serve a month in jail.
Six weeks after being released, she tested positive again. This time, she was ordered to Jefferson County Drug Court, which sent her to a drug rehab program at Wayside Christian Mission.
She was living there in 2002 when TARC was invited to a job fair for high-risk individuals.
Wayside was “basically asking … employers in the community to give these individuals a second chance … and we said yes,” David Wheat, who was TARC’s human-resources director at the time, said in a deposition.
Wheat said eight or nine residents applied and two were hired — Walter and a man with alcohol problems who was fired later for unrelated reasons.
Wheat said Walter never would have been hired “off the street” because of the TARC’s employment rules on drug and alcohol convictions. But he said he thought management wanted him to make an exception for the Wayside program.
Executive Director J. Barry Barker said in a deposition that he knew Wheat and John Woodford, then TARC’s assistant executive director, attended the job fair, but he didn’t sanction hiring anyone.
But Barker also said he always encouraged Wheat to “cast a fairly broad net” in seeking candidates for entry-level jobs.
“I have a strong belief in non-discriminatory hiring,” Barker said in the deposition.
Tom Hectus, an attorney that TARC hired for Walter, though she is not named as a defendant in the suit, said in an interview that “society should try to find employment for recovering addicts.
“If they are truly recovered … and not using, I don’t know why they should be disqualified from any employment,” said Hectus.
Wheat said in his deposition that he wasn’t concerned about hiring Walter because he knew she would be subjected to an initial drug screen, then random testing, as are all 440 of TARC’s drivers, under federal rules that required 50 percent of operators to be tested annually.
Wheat also said that despite Walter’s background, he thought she should be “treated like anyone else coming into the program” and not be required to undergo additional testing.
But Woodford, now retired, said in a deposition that because of her background, Walter should have been tested more — although he also said she shouldn’t have been hired “in the first place.”
“My position … on it was that we shouldn’t compromise our hiring standards,” he said.
THE ATTORNEY
Hable grew up in Ashland, the oldest of five children. His father was a sheet-metal worker and roofer; his mother worked in a factory as a seamstress.
Hable worked his way through the University of Kentucky, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a 3.8 grade-point average. At UK’s law school, he finished in the top four in a class of 178, then went to Washington, where he worked in the Justice Department doing prosecutions as an assistant U.S. attorney.
He signed on at Wyatt in 1980 and was elevated to partner in four years.
Taking leaves of absences, he served from 1987 to 1989 as Gov. Wallace Wilkinson’s budget director (Hable had worked for Wilkinson as a student, at Wallace’s Bookstore), and from 1991 to 1994 as Gov. Brereton Jones’ cabinet secretary.
“What attracted me was both his competence and his commitment to wanting to help people who needed help,” Jones said in an interview.
Hable was elected managing partner in 2000, commanding 225 lawyers in offices in four states and a support staff of nearly 300.
He also served on a half-dozen civic boards and committees, including the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence and Greater Louisville Inc.’s education task force, which matched volunteers with students struggling to read.
Hable’s legal specialty was putting together multimillion-dollar deals.
“My strength … was to be ahead of the opponent,” he told a vocational consultant hired as an expert by his lawyers and who was deposed in the lawsuit. “And that meant I knew the case better. I knew the ins and outs, all the subtleties. And I could out-think and out-argue my opponent.”
EMPLOYMENT woes
Hired by TARC in June 2002, Walter missed three straight days of training and was fired. She was rehired two months later, then fired again for missing more classes.
Barker acknowledged in his deposition that he rehired her not knowing she’d been in two previous training classes.
Citing the pending litigation, TARC spokeswoman Nina Walfoort told a reporter that she could not elaborate on questions raised by the lawsuit.
Though all drivers are subject to random drug testing, Walter’s name never came up, TARC officials said in depositions — again, without elaboration.
But in October 2003, 16 months after she began driving, Walter was tested after a minor accident in which a passenger was injured. (TARC’s policy requires drug testing after any accident involving injuries.)
The test came back positive for cocaine, and Walter was referred to an employee-assistance program for counseling. She later was allowed to resume driving.
Barker defended that decision in his deposition: “My understanding of the federal requirements is that … if someone tests positive, they don’t want us firing them, they want us rehabilitating them.”
But Paul Griffo, a spokesman for the Federal Transit Administration, said federal law only requires transit agencies to report employee drug-testing statistics. It’s up to each agency to set its policy regarding drivers who test positive for controlled substances, he said.
In his deposition, Barker said he doesn’t think TARC has hired any drivers out of drug-rehabilitation programs since the accident.
Wheat, who retired the month before the crash, said he didn’t know what percentage of drivers had felony drug records, but that they would be few and far between.
Walfoort said the agency would not elaborate.
From 2003 through 2005, Walter had three minor accidents driving for TARC, including one in which she sideswiped a parked car and two in which she knocked parts off side-view mirrors, according to TARC records.
She was not tested for drugs after those non-injury incidents.
After repeated work absences, Walter received three warnings and was fired a third time, on June 24, 2005, records show. But she was reinstated three days later, with a 15-day suspension. Court records show she was able to prove that some of her absences were because of illnesses in her family.
TARC warned Walter then that she would be permanently terminated if she missed three or more days in any 30-day period, but the agency failed to back up that threat when she missed five days in the weeks leading up to her collision with Hable.
That was not explained in the court depositions.
THE ACCIDENT
At about 9 a.m. Aug. 8, 2005, Hable was driving north on Dundee, just three-tenths of a mile from his home, according to court documents.
Walter later told a supervisor she was running late and came to a “rolling stop” as she headed east on Trevilian, according to those records.
But Sandra Berman, a retired teacher who was walking to the Douglass Loop, told police that the bus was going so fast she didn’t think it could have stopped.
The Rev. Steven Johns-Boehme, a Christian Church minister who was in a car behind Hable’s, agreed. “As quickly … as that bus came through the intersection,” he said in a deposition, “the thought that ran through my mind was the bus didn’t stop.”
Johns-Boehme also told police he remembered seeing the Jeep’s brake lights, indicating it stopped, or at least slowed, according to his deposition.
At 9:03 a.m., the bus smashed in the driver’s side of Hable’s 10-year-old Cherokee, knocking the vehicle 28 feet across the intersection into a stop sign.
TARC says its accident reconstructionist will testify that it is likely that the Jeep didn’t come to a stop at the intersection and that both vehicles were traveling 11 mph to 17 mph at the time of impact.
But the investigating officer, Louisville Metro Police Officer Joseph Smolenski, determined that Walter was at fault, concluding that she couldn’t have reached the speed needed for her bus to inflict the damage it did on Hable’s vehicle if she had come to a stop.
Neither Walter nor Hable was cited in the accident.
A plaintiff’s expert, retired Kentucky State Police Maj. Henry “Sonny” Cease, who once ran the state police accident reconstruction program, concluded that Walter drove through the intersection at 29 mph, while Hable was going 6 or 7 mph, consistent with having stopped first.
Hable was found slumped across the front seat, unconscious. Eleven of 12 ribs on his left side were broken. He was comatose when he was brought to University Hospital, where Greg Haynes was among the first to see him.
“I said, ‘He is going to die,’ ” Haynes recalled in an interview.
AFTER THE CRASH
Tested a few hours after the accident for drugs and alcohol, Walter’s urine was found to have a pH level so high that a doctor at TARC’s testing company, Occupational Physician Services, found it was “suspect in terms of whether it had been tampered with or whether it was indeed human urine,” according to documents in the court file.
Walter was ordered by TARC to submit to a second test, and two days later she tested positive for cocaine.
A toxicologist hired by Hable’s legal team, Michael Evans, CEO of AIT Laboratories of Indianapolis, said in a deposition that the residual level of cocaine showed with a “reasonable scientific probability” that Walter was under the influence of the drug at the time of the collision.
She was not charged with any crime.
severe INJURIES
Hable spent 17 days at University Hospital. His brain swelled so badly that doctors had to insert a valve in his skull to let it drain. He suffered pneumonia and respiratory failure and had to be placed on a ventilator.
He didn’t recognize his brother, Kyle Hable, or their mother, Agnes. “It tore her up, very, very badly,” Kyle Hable said in a deposition.
Kevin Hable slowly regained consciousness and was transferred to Frazier Rehab Institute, where he spent two months, learning to talk and walk and even to swallow again.
His doctors found that he had “significant deficiencies” in “problem solving, executive functioning and verbal fluency” and that the injuries to his brain also impaired his balance, strength and ability to walk.
When released from rehab, he couldn’t take care of himself. Divorced 15 years earlier and with his only child, Clayton, in graduate school, Hable paid his brother to move in for six months.
The law firm sent catered food to the house, and neighbors came by to help.
The avid hunter, hiker and fisherman struggled with the simplest physical tasks, his brother said, once getting so angry as he tried to walk that he started crying.
“Taking a step, he would have to sit and negotiate and think and watch his leg try to move, and then finally take that first step,” Kyle said.
In March 2006, using a walker, Hable returned to work on the 26th floor of PNC Plaza.
His partners welcomed and tried to help him, but he found that he couldn’t think quickly enough, couldn’t solve problems and couldn’t even take notes as he talked with clients.
In September 2006, he took early retirement.
“Practicing law for me was a way to become involved in public affairs and make a contribution back to the greater world,” Hable said in a deposition. “And I can’t do that any more.”
FIRED BY TARC
After being fired by TARC following the accident, Walter found a job at a catering company. She said last March in a brief interview that she had been drug-free for 14 months.
She was arrested on Feb. 3, 2006, and charged with trafficking in cocaine when police searched a house on Vermont Avenue and found three rocks of crack cocaine, marijuana and Ecstasy — and Walter with $78 in cash in her hand, according to court records.
The charges were later dismissed. Her lawyer in that case, Alex Dathorne, said charges were dropped because she was one of many people at the house and no drugs were found on her.
Walter said in her deposition that she doesn’t remember much about the 2005 accident.
“I have turned it over to God,” she said.
THE AFTERMATH
Hable refuses to call it an accident; he prefers “wreck.”
“I believe that the word ‘accident’ connotes a lack of design or foreseeability,” he said in his deposition. “And I think the evidence so far, at least as it’s been explained to me, is pretty clear in this case that the bus driver was completely reckless in running a stop sign and hitting me, and that TARC showed a wanton disregard for its duty to public safety.”
Hable reads three newspapers a day and told TARC’s lawyers that he was reading a new English translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. But he said his problem-solving skills aren’t improving.
On a typical day, he said, he goes for physical training in the morning, then comes home and reads, listens to National Public Radio and watches TV news. “My life feels the same every day,” he said.
Dr. William Kraft, former director of brain-injury programs at Frazier Rehab Institute, who examined Hable as a plaintiff’s expert, said in a deposition that he has sustained a “significant injury to his sense of self,” along with his more obvious injuries.
But Hable said he hasn’t given up.
“Since the wreck, my life has become an unfinished painting sitting over discarded in a dark corner, stacked against the wall,” he said. “And that is unacceptable to me. To me, a life without purpose is pointless.”