A 39-year-old woman who allegedly fell out of an Aloha Transport bus on the Zhongli section of the Sun Yat-sen Freeway (Freeway No. 1) died on Saturday night after being run over by two other vehicles.
The woman, surnamed Chi (紀), and her mother were taking the bus from Kaohsiung to the family home in Taipei.
One of the bus’ emergency exit doors was opened, triggering an alarm, but the driver could not stop immediately, as the bus was on the Wugu-Yangmei Overpass and he had to drive until he was off the overpass to pull to the shoulder of the northbound lanes, police said.
The driver told police that he had not heard or seen any altercation among the passengers prior to the incident, and that no passenger reported anything unusual, they said.
Chi’s mother told police that her daughter had physical and mental issues, and needed to take medication regularly, but was capable of taking care of herself, so she had let her use the bus’ restroom on her own.
The mother told police she had no idea why her daughter would have opened the exit or how she could have fallen from the bus.
The driver said the emergency exit alarm sounds before an exit door opens, so when he heard the alarm, he checked his rear-view mirror and saw a person who “appeared to be flying out of an emergency exit,” police said.
As soon as the driver pulled the bus over, he took a head count of passengers, and asked Chi’s mother where her daughter was, police said.
A passenger seated near the bathroom told police that Chi went straight to the emergency exit door after leaving the bathroom and opened it and that she fell out of the bus before anyone could stop her.
Bus operators said that all emergency exit doors on their vehicles can be opened from the inside or the outside, but to do so from inside requires a person to first activate a device that is inside an acrylic box next to the exit, which triggers the exit alarm.
Police said the cause of the incident remains under investigation.
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