The night after Ren Xiang Yao returned home to New York City from visiting his newborn grandchild in China, he decided the antidote for his jet lag was an overnight bus trip to the Mohegan Sun casino.  It was a trip that changed his life, and left him with no chance of ever holding his grandchild in his own hands again.  Mr. Yao, 63, lost part of each of his arms while trying to shield his head in the March 12, 2011, crash of a World Wide Travel bus on Interstate 95 that killed 15 passengers, and left survivors like him severely wounded, physically and emotionally. On Thursday, he took the witness stand in State Supreme Court in the Bronx and recalled in vivid detail the sound of bus wheels scratching against something — “chut, chut, chut” — followed by a “boom.”  “After that I just felt like everything was coming over me and the person sitting next to me just disappeared,” said Mr. Yao, speaking through a translator, as the sleeves of his gray suit flapped visibly where his arms once were. He has a metal hook in place of his left hand.  Mr. Yao’s testimony was the emotional linchpin in the trial of the bus driver, Ophadell Williams, who faces charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide. One after another, crash survivors have taken the stand in the last several weeks, with each account adding a bit more to the story, like a mosaic being ever so painstakingly pieced together.  Prosecutors contend that Mr. Williams, 41, drove recklessly right before the crash because he was tired from a lack of rest, while Mr. Williams’s lawyer, Patrick L. Bruno, has claimed instead that he lost control of the bus after being cut off by a tractor-trailer. The tour bus crashed into a guardrail, tipped over and careered into a signpost with enough force to shear off the roof.  “It happened as a motor vehicle accident, not as some crime,” Mr. Bruno said outside the courtroom on Thursday. “He tried to avoid tragedy, and tragedy occurred.”  Mr. Yao, a former garment worker and forklift operator at Kennedy International Airport, recounted an uneventful ride from Chinatown to the casino, in Uncasville, Conn. After a night of gambling — and winning a little — he boarded the bus and, he said, settled into window seat No. 39 in the back and tried to close his eyes and relax.  When the bus crashed, he said, he instinctively raised his arms. “It’s very important to protect my head,” he said. “That’s why I lost my hands, my arms.”  He said he never saw the crash or the pole coming toward him. He said he could barely breathe. He remembered being trapped and hearing the rescue workers arrive. “I used all the energy I had left and said, ‘I’m here, I’m here, please come rescue me,’ ” he said. “By the time I woke up, I was already in the hospital.”  Mr. Yao said that he spent nearly a month at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, where he had several operations and skin transplants.  Mr. Yao was accompanied to court by his wife, Rui Jing Yao, who removed his sunglasses for him before he took the stand. He said the loss of his arms had put his wife under stress and damaged his marriage of over 40 years. “We even thought about getting a divorce,” he said.  In cross-examination, Mr. Bruno asked Mr. Yao if he had filed a lawsuit against the bus company seeking damages over the accident (his wife had also sued for what he called “loss of services”).  “Yes,” Mr. Yao acknowledged. “Because someone has to be responsible for the loss of my arms.”
Ren Xiang Yao lost parts of each arm in the bus crash last year that killed 15 people as it returned from the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut.