Teen charged in Wake wreck that injured 11-year-old

Lindsey Tight was charged with failure to reduce speed and passing a stopped school bus.

A school bus was stopped on Johnson Pond Road near Oak Park Drive at about 7 a.m. to pick up three students. The bus driver saw an approaching car that wasn't slowing down and began honking the horn frantically, witnesses said. Two of the students looked up, saw the car and stepped back from the road, but Michael Burgess stepped into the road and was hit, they said.

"Me and Bryce looked over and saw the red car was coming really fast, and we're like, 'Michael,' and we're all scared and everything," said Meredith Navarro, one of the students at the bus stop. "The next thing we know, the car is hitting Michael, and he goes up and then he slams down in the ditch."

"You could hear the impact. It was bad," nearby resident Mary Seay said. "You hear Meredith screaming, and you see Michael flying in the air."

Michael, a sixth-grader at West Lake Middle School, was knocked into a roadside ditch.

"I just sat with him and held his hand," Seay said. "He's crying, he's hurting, he's bleeding – there's blood everywhere. I was doing my best to stay together for him until the ambulance got there to help him."

Michael was taken to WakeMed, where he was listed in fair condition.

Tight, who was driving to Middle Creek High School and had her 12-year-old sister in the car, said she didn't see the stopped school bus in the morning fog.

"She's saying she just did not see the lights of the school bus," Sgt. Mike Baker of the Highway Patrol said.

Area residents said they didn't have any trouble seeing the bus coming down the street.

"When the bus driver was all the way down there at the end of the road, we could see her lights on already," Meredith said.

Meredith and the other student at the bus stop stayed home from school because they were too shaken up to go to class.

"I feel for her too," Seay said of Tight. "It's got to be a traumatizing thing. It is for everybody – for her, for the bus driver, for the kids just crying and crying and crying because they haven't seen anything like that before."

Johnson Pond Road was closed until about 9 a.m. as troopers investigated the incident.