A former Metrobus driver will serve a year in prison for negligent homicide in a 2008 bus crash that killed a California man as he rode in a D.C. taxi with his wife and two children.
The sentencing hearing, held in D.C. Superior Court, marked the end of the saga since the Sept. 26, 2008 crash just west of the White House upended two families.
Ronald Taylor, 41, was sentenced to 12 months in prison and three years of supervised release, less than the three-year prison term that prosecutors had sought.
| The timeline |
| SBlt July 2007: Ronald Taylor gets out of prison after serving 12 years on a 1994 drug conviction. |
| • March 2008: He joins Metro as a bus driver. |
| • Sept. 26, 2008: Bartlett Tabor is killed after Taylor runs a red light and slams his bus into a taxi. |
| • Oct. 2008: Taylor is fired. |
| SBlt Jan. 2010: |
| Metro settles a lawsuit filed by the Tabor family for an undisclosed amount of money. |
| • May 2010: Metro is ordered by an arbitration panel to rehire Taylor and pay him back pay. He becomes a station manager. |
| • April 2011: Taylor is charged with negligent homicide. |
| • April 2012: He is refired from Metro, two weeks after pleading guilty to the charge. |
But he is serving at least 18 months for a parole violation, triggered by pleading guilty to the negligent homicide charge earlier this year.
In giving him the shorter sentence, Judge Ronna Lee Beck said his prior drug convictions should not play a major role in a crash conviction unconnected to such criminal activity. Yet, she noted they already had. After the 18 months for the parole violation, he will be in jail for close to three years.
Bartlett Tabor, 55, a finance executive, was killed while visiting D.C. for a business trip with his wife, Kathy, and their children, then 9 and 10 years old. They were riding in a sport utility taxi on 19th Street NW near the intersection of Virginia Avenue just before 8:15 p.m.
Taylor was driving his out-of-service bus to the Friendship Heights bus garage for a break. He was speeding, 16.5 mph above the 25 mph limit on Virginia Avenue, and ran through a red light that had changed at least 17 seconds earlier.
His attorney, Nikki Lotze, said it is a confusing intersection in which one can see another light — which was green — behind the red light. “He entered the intersection thinking he had the green,” Lotze said.
The bus crashed into the taxi, knocking the cabbie unconscious and injuring all involved.
Tabor, who sat in the middle of the passenger seat, was the sole person not wearing a seat belt, Lotze said. The force of the crash plunged him into the dashboard. She noted he was the only one who died, questioning whether the outcome might have been different with a seat belt.
Kathy Tabor told the court that she thought the hardest day of her life was when she told her children that their father was dead but couldn’t hold them as she lay with a broken sternum in a hospital bed. But she said she now knows the hardest part is living without him every day, watching her son learn how to tie a tie for his middle-school graduation from a YouTube video.
Taylor apologized to the Tabor family, directing his comments to the children, who sat next to their mother. “I can’t give your father back,” said Taylor, a father himself who grew up without one around. “It hurts looking at you, knowing the hurt I’ve caused you. … I pray that you can forgive me somehow, someday.”
