The Washington Post’s James Hohmann digs into the driving record of Carla Proctor, the Metrobus driver who was behind the wheel of the bus that struck 30-year-old jogger Amanda Mahnke on Sept. 3. Proctor had two previous on-the-job accidents: one in 2004, when she crashed a Metrobus into the back of a parked vehicle on the 1300 block of Wisconsin Ave. NW, and another in 2003, when she allegedly failed to properly apply a brake before she exited a bus to inspect a faulty door. That bus “rolled down a hill and struck a car, setting off a chain of crashes that damaged seven vehicles as well as the bus.”
The story also points to a couple of incidents involving Proctor’s personal vehicles, including a 2003 crash that sounds like it was by no means necessarily her fault but saw her car smash into a Wendy’s in Oxon Hill, and a spate of tickets from earlier this year related to driving an unregistered vehicle.
None of these incidents would have precluded Proctor from continuing to do her job as a Metrobus driver. The standard at WMATA is four “preventable-minor” accidents or three “preventable-major” accidents on the job within a 365 day period, according to the Post. And considering that the worst (and the majority) of these incidents took place five or more years ago, it’s pretty tough to make an argument on this evidence alone that Proctor didn’t belong behind the wheel of that bus. Nearly five years accident-free? For a professional driver, that’s fairly decent.