Jill Bien didn’t plan to be a hero. She probably thought that she’d never be one. The 48 year old bar tender from Chicago lived what many would call a pretty ordinary life.
Just another ordinary day
Bien was heading home to Chicago after an evening at the Potawatomi Hotel and Casino playing bingo. She boarded a charter bus like she always did and settled in for the 90-mile trip back home. Everything seemed to be going well.
As they approached 35 miles, however, Bien became aware of the bus drifting fast towards the right shoulder of the highway. ‘There was a concrete barrier on the shoulder of the I-94 that separated the interstate from the ditch alongside it,’ says Bien. ‘The bus scraped against this barrier and veered right back into the traffic on the interstate.’
Time for action
Terrified, Bien yelled to the driver to stop the bus. She was seated right behind him. That’s when she noticed that the driver’s seat was empty. James Rogers, the driver, lay unconscious in a crumpled heap in the stairwell. No one was driving the bus. It was sure to crash.
‘My life flashed before my eyes in that moment,’ says Bien. ‘I looked around and saw other passengers bouncing around in the bus. Others lay in the aisle. My only thought at that time was that I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.’
The bus was out of control. They were careening in and out of the interstate traffic at more than 55mph. Something needed to be done or they would all end up dead or hurt. Bien sprang into action and leaped into the empty driver’s seat. Yelling for someone to call 911 and grabbing the wheel, she turned the bus on the highway’s shoulder and brought it to a stop.
‘She’s my hero,’ says one of the passengers from that night, Marge Borkowski. ‘If she didn’t turn that bus only God knows what could have happened to us.’
The aftermath
Emergency service personal arrived at the scene after a few minutes. 11 passengers were taken to the hospital for treatment for minor injuries. None of the 45 passengers on that night died or were seriously injured as a result of Bien’s fast actions.
How did the hero react after the whole incident? “I bawled my eyes out when I got home,” says Bien. “The whole incident kept playing back in my mind.” She was on a bus two days later headed back to the casino. “I didn’t want to give fear the opportunity to build up in my mind,” she says.
Dan Ruth, the sheriff’s sergeant at Kenosha County, who was at the accident scene, said he’d never witnessed anything as heroic as Bien’s actions in all his 18 years in law enforcement.
