On Apr. 16, 1973, a tragic accident occurred in Almería, Spain when a drunk driver crashed a gravel truck into a bus carrying seventeen students and one instructor who were on a Barcelona-based program sponsored by Knox College. The crash left fifteen injured, one paralyzed, and four deceased, including the bus driver.
John Knoche ‘74 was attending the program and was among the students on the bus that day.
“It was a horrific crash, and simply because I was away from where it hit and I saw it coming I had braced myself, so I had a dislocated hip and a head injury. Everybody else was hospitalized and immobile,” Knoche said.
Because his injuries were relatively less serious and he was proficient in both Spanish and English, Knoche and a few other students took the lead before Knox faculty could arrive.
“The first thing they did was give me all the passports, and then I went from bed to bed, and they taped the passports next to the injured students,” Knoche said.
Knoche even had to identify the bodies of two students who died as an immediate result of the crash. The third student ultimately passed later on in the hospital as a result of her injuries.
Betty Spieth-Croll ‘74, also attending the program, was very familiar with Barcelona, having lived there the summer before the accident. Because of her familiarity, Speith-Croll began to feel like she was no longer a tourist to the area, and decided to hitchhike with two other students that day instead of taking the bus. They planned on meeting those on the bus at the restaurant where they were headed for lunch.
After waiting at the restaurant for a while, somebody informed them of the crash and offered to take them to the site in a taxi.
“We knew on that taxi ride up from the restaurant that some students had been killed. We didn’t know who, so imagine you’d just spent the better part of a year with these friends, and you learn that some of them have died,” Spieth-Croll said.
Having not been injured, Spieth-Croll and the others that weren’t on the bus were tasked with the clean up, including getting the luggage off of the bus and cleaning it, and getting in touch with Knox faculty. Eventually, they got a hold of French professor Jay Paul Minn, who was in France at the time, and Spanish professor Jorge Prats, who originally began the Knox Barcelona program.
Because of how difficult it was to communicate back to the United States, Minn and Prats did not receive the news of the accident until a couple of days following.
“It was a tiny town, nobody spoke English. Back in the 70s you couldn’t make a call back to the states, you literally had to reserve a line and it would be available the next day or something, so the communication was very spotty,” Spieth-Croll said.
A month after the accident, Minn described the scene at the hospital upon his arrival to the previous Dean of Students Ivan Harlan.
“The small provincial hospital had never had a disaster before, and absolute chaos reigned. The doctors and nurses did not sleep for 48 hours, setting limbs, sewing wounds, giving transfusions, etc. […] Not only was there confusion, yelling, and pain, but the room was filled with reporters trying to get interviews from unconscious people,” Minn said.
In the years following, the accident was known very little amongst the Knox community. Both Knoche and Spieth-Croll think this can be attributed to a few reasons, one simply being the era in which the crash occurred.
“This was before PTSD, and before counseling […] It was a different time and a different way of treating things,” Knoche said.
Spieth-Croll also noted that, especially as one of the students not on the bus that day, her experience was downplayed, as if nothing had happened to her.
Furthermore, around the same time that the accident had occurred, the president of Knox College Sharvy Umbeck, died unexpectedly from a heart attack, possibly due to the stress inflicted by the accident. Consequently, his death overshadowed the devastation of the crash.
A final reason for the accident being unknown in the Knox community is that 70% of the students on the trip were not Knox students attending the program. This includes the three students who died.
“Say there were 20 plus people on the program, only five were from Knox. And I think that’s one reason not much was said about it, because none of the Knox people were, in the end, seriously injured and certainly none of them were killed,” Knoche said.
Knoche and Spieth-Croll, taking notice that the accident has for the most part been forgotten amongst the community, sought to revitalize its memory. While planning their 50th class reunion, they worked with the college to initiate the planting of a tree and plaque marking the event. The living memorial now sits on the South Lawn of Seymour Union.
“For those of us who went through it, coming back and sort of planting this tree and doing a memorial has been very cathartic for us, so it’s been wonderful,” Speith-Croll said.
During Homecoming weekend, on Oct. 27 at 1:00 p.m., a dedication and gathering took place at the memorial. The event included reflections from a group of those who were on the trip, including Knoche and Speith-Kroll, arrangements from the music department, and a blessing from Director of Spiritual Life, Daniel Marlin.
