Shrill screams and shattering glass pierced Jamie Hausman's slumber. His head slammed into the bus seat in front of him, snapped back into the seat behind him and lurched sideways into a window.

The 19-year-old pitcher on the Bluffton University baseball team opened his eyes but could not see in the darkness.

Renee' Hannans Henry/Staff (ENLARGE)

Standing on the overpass from which the bus plunged, families of the Bluffton University baseball team look Saturday at the scene of the crash that killed four athletes, the bus driver and his wife.

Robin Nelson/Special to the AJC (ENLARGE)

Bluffton team captain Ryan Baightel recalls horrific moments of the crash. His coach remained in intensive care.

Chris Hunt/Staff (ENLARGE)

Dr. Eric Ossmann (left), chief of EMS at Grady Memorial Hospital, with Dr. Leon Haley Jr., chief of ER, addresses the media in front of the hospital on Friday.

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Hausman reached out with his left hand and gripped a seat. He hung on, literally, for dear life.

The bus plunged onto the interstate below.

"I knew we were flipping. I would feel guys moving over me and tumbling on the floor."

Hausman estimates he blacked out for 15 seconds. He came to in a puddle of diesel fuel.

At the back of the bus, he heard his roommate, Chris Bauman, screaming. His legs were pinned under the bus taking the Bluffton Beavers from their Ohio university to a baseball tournament in Florida.

Ryan Baightel seat was on the driver's side in back.

The 21-year-old shortstop was relatively unscathed. Though he hadn't told his parents yet, Baightel had recently been elected team captain. On a squad with no seniors, leadership would be key.

And now, in the Atlanta darkness, the captain began to lead.

With the charter bus on its side, Baightel and others walked across the side windows. They crawled out the open space, rimmed with shards of glass, where the windshield had been.

Other players kicked out the emergency hatches on the roof and scrambled out of the bus. Every time someone stepped out, it put pressure on the bus, and Hausman could hear his roommate scream.

Fearing the fuel could ignite, he and another teammate headed toward the front of the bus. They passed a player pinned under the wreckage.

They screamed at him, trying to get a response. But the player said nothing. Hausman understood: "I knew he was gone."

At the front of the bus, head coach James Grandey shouted for everyone to get out. As usual, his first concern was for his players.

Grandey was particularly close to his team because of his age — 29 — and openness. Kids felt they could talk to him. They were always in his office, chewing the fat about school and life. When the team lifted weights, the 6-foot-3, 250-pound Grandey would run on the treadmill just so he could be with them.

But now, as he lay in the bus, Grandey realized he needed help, too. The coach cried out: "I can't feel my legs!"

In spite of a broken collarbone, freshman A.J. Ramthun hoisted the hefty coach up and dragged him out of the bus. Outside, the coach insisted paramedics focus on his players. But Grandey was critically injured. Paramedics loaded him onto an ambulance bound for Piedmont Hospital.

A stranger, perhaps a motorist who stopped to help, yanked Hausman up by the back of his shirt collar.

He was out of the wreckage.

He was free.

•••••

Grady Memorial Hospital paramedics Tony Trimble and Brian Shepler idled at the foot of "EMS Alley," a strip of asphalt that launches ambulances from the emergency room parking lot. Just minutes into a 5:30 a.m. shift, they prepared to gulp down home-brewed coffee from Shepler's enormous stainless steel Thermos. But before Shepler could pour the first cup, the dispatch radio crackled to life.

Bus accident.

It was 5:42 a.m. The paramedics' first sips of coffee were five hours away.

They raced to the scene in 4 minutes and 32 seconds, joining emergency medical technicians with the Atlanta Fire Department who had arrived moments earlier.

Shepler helped with more severe injuries at the front of the bus, where five or six passengers had been ejected. Several were "posturing," their arms and legs flexing to and fro in a stiff way that Shepler recognized as a sign of brain injuries. Trimble entered the bus and surveyed the condition of survivors.

Two passengers were trapped, their limbs penned beneath the bus. Trimble rummaged for blankets inside the vehicle, placed them over the trapped passengers, and cleared out so firefighters could extract them.

•••••

As Dr. Eric Ossmann headed for his shower at home, his pager went off. The medical director of Grady Emergency Medical Services only gets called to the grisliest of accidents. The general standard: at least five people killed or severely injured.

So when the cellphone pager chirped, Ossmann did an about-face. He returned to his bedside, took one look at the text message and knew this wouldn't be an oxford-and-tie morning.

"Major incident school bus over Northside bridge under the interstate," the message read. "Five ambulances on scene, one supervisor, multiple 48."

In the parlance of paramedics, "48's" are fatalities. Dr. Ossmann threw on scrubs and dashed out the door.

It was 6 a.m.

That's when the first call reached Dr. Leon Haley, Grady's chief of emergency medicine. His job was to make sure the trauma unit was prepared for a surge of patients.

Fridays are Haley's days to "play Dad" and get his three kids off to school while his wife, a physician in private practice, goes into her office early. So Haley calmly continued with his duties, including doing his 5-year-old daughter's hair. His confidence is rooted in the knowledge that if anyone is ready for a disaster, it's Grady.

As tragedy unfolded beneath the underpass, one thing was working in the survivors' favor. They had crashed just down the road from the only Level 1 trauma center within 100 miles. This was a hospital whose top-rate reputation inspired the bumper sticker: "If I'm injured in a crash, take me to Grady."

On the average Friday night, 19 trauma cases move through the center. That, as it turns out, was exactly the number headed Grady's way. Only these patients would be coming all at once.

•••••

Hausman, suffering from a mild concussion, deep bruises and some abrasions, huddled with other players along the interstate's concrete dividers, about 100 yards from the bus. It was still dark, and they were freezing. Hausman stood in sock feet that, like his pants, where soaked in fuel.

While the more critically wounded were hauled away in ambulances to Grady, Piedmont and Atlanta Medical Center, other players took it upon themselves to help treat each other. Some tore off their T-shirts to use as bandages for teammates with minor cuts.

The players launched a search for cellphones. They came up with three and passed them around.

When Baightel got through to his parents, he said, " 'It's terrible, it's terrible, it's terrible' over and over again," his mother, Val Baightel, would say later. "He said he climbed out of the window and felt like he was going to puke."

Hausman knew his parents would be worried. He had last talked to his mom Wednesday night, the day before his team left campus and his parents left their home for Florida.

They were going to Pensacola, where his stepfather annually plays in a fantasy baseball camp for "the old guys," ages 35 and up. From there they planned to go to Fort Myers and see their son play. It was to be big game for Hausman, scheduled to make his first start on the mound.

Hausman used one of his teammate's phones to call his dad's cellphone. It rang, but there was no answer.

•••••

Eventually Trimble was joined by a dozen other paramedics and 40 to 50 firefighters. They had set up triage to sort the victims into three groups: the dead, the severely injured and the "walking wounded."

Rescuers made a point of shielding the walking wounded, stationing them where the bus blocked their view of the dead and severely injured. They checked and rechecked their conditions. At one point Trimble could see a deep bruise spreading down one player's side, so he packed him into an ambulance.

Another patient, who had been loaded into an ambulance, went into cardiac arrest. As the cardiac monitor flat-lined, Trimble knew what he had to do.

"I had to make the call. We needed the resources for another patient."

The banged and bruised players watched as rescuers removed the body from the ambulance and ferried it to the makeshift morgue beneath the underpass.

For Hausman, reality set in. "We're going to lose some teammates," he thought. They huddled up and said a few prayers.

The players boarded a MARTA bus that would ferry them to Grady. Trimble hopped on, too, and watched carefully to make sure their conditions didn't deteriorate.

But before they could leave, a doctor boarded the bus and indicated he needed someone to help ID the dead. Baightel stood up and volunteered.

"This is my team," Trimble recalled the player saying. "I'm the captain."

A fireman fetched a pair of black boots for the shoeless captain, who walked over to the bodies draped in sheets. He returned to the bus and quietly announced to the others the names of their fellow players who hadn't made it.

David Betts.

Scott Harmon.

Cody Holp.

Tyler Williams.

Seated at the back of the bus, the teammates clasped hands, bowed their heads and prayed.

"It was probably the most impressive thing I've ever seen," Trimble would later recall. "They all handled it with the kind of dignity most men would envy."

Now, an hour after plunging to the pavement in one bus, the walking wounded headed to Grady in another. They were the lucky 13.

•••••

Jamie Hausman's parents were in bed, asleep in a hotel in Pensacola. Barry and Lynn Mesley had driven 13 hours, desperately in need of a vacation. Both work as firefighter-paramedics in Cincinnati, and it had been a rough two weeks. Lynn's father had suffered a heart attack and undergone emergency surgery. Barry had gone through one of the worst calls of his career, responding to an ice storm that splintered a tree and trapped a 9-year-old girl under a large limb. She hadn't survived.

So when the Mesleys finally made it to their hotel at 11 p.m., Barry had put his cellphone on vibrate and collapsed.

When it rattled against the nightstand at 5:45 a.m. Friday, he mumbled to his wife to ignore it. She reached for it, but was too late.

It wasn't their son's number, but they noticed it was a Bluffton area code.

Lynn Mesley returned the missed call, reaching her son's teammate, who put Jamie on the phone.

She could hear crying, yelling, screaming. Sirens.

Her son was talking fast.

"You have to slow down," she said, "and tell me what happened."

He was confused, thinking the bus had driven off the side of the road.

"Well, where are you?" his mom asked.

"I'm standing outside the bus."

His mom, in work mode, needed more details. She has helped extricate victims from crumpled wreckage. She's seen the impact of a crash toss people out windows and watched them walk away. All the possibilities ran through her mind. She'd cut too many teenagers out of cars.

She was relieved to hear Jamie say he had been well enough to crawl out of the wreckage on his own.

Calm down, she told him. Tend to yourself and others.

She hung up and barked orders to her husband. "Turn on the TV. Turn on CNN."

He fumbled for his eyeglasses so he could see the remote. Footage of the wreck flashed on the screen, followed by a diagram showing how the bus had sailed off the overpass.

"Oh, God," Jamie's stepdad thought. "This is bad. How did anyone survive something like that?"

The couple made the drive to Atlanta in record time, pushing the needle to 100 mph. As Lynn Mesley would say later, "We had wings on the car."

•••••

By the time Dr. Haley arrived at Grady, the three most critical cases — those who suffered head, abdominal and lung injuries — were being treated. Two were already in the operating room.

Haley bypassed the blue zone (reserved for medical emergencies such as heart attacks) and headed straight to the red zone, where trauma patients go — about 2,500 a year. There, he and Dr. Ossmann exchanged notes. Throughout the day, they would hold news conferences, giving updates on the survivors' conditions. The accident had captured national attention.

As the MARTA bus arrived with the walking wounded, Grady staff formed a line to help the boys off the bus, patting them on the back and peppering them with questions about their symptoms. Jamie Hausman found the staff's compassion and organization soothing.

Nurses loaded the players onto beds, checked their vital signs once again and rolled them across the gray-speckled floor and out of Grady's triage area.

Hausman and others were taken to a decontamination room and hosed down to remove the fuel. It struck Jamie it was like washing a dog. He was given Motrin for pain, X-rays and a CAT-scan.

The young men settled into a room normally set aside for patients awaiting x-rays. There, beneath a rainbow of ceiling tiles glowing with paint-by-number butterflies, they eagerly awaited news about their friends and coaches.

Social workers tried to give the players constant updates, but the rumor mill ran rampant. At one point, the players believed Coach Grandey was dead. They thought about his wife and the 4-month-old daughter he was so proud of.

It would be more than three hours before those players gathered at Grady learned the truth, that their coach was still hanging in there, in serious condition but improving.

•••••

Jamie Hausman's parents arrived at Grady around 2:30 p.m. and were greeted by Red Cross volunteers offering food and water. Lynn Mesley said: "Just let me see my son."

Jamie, dressed in green doctors' scrub pants and a white Grady polo shirt, was in a room with another teammate, watching CNN broadcast details of the wreck and lapping up food from a hospital tray. "Good," his Dad thought, "the bottomless pit is eating. That's normal."

Like other parents whose kids had survived, the Mesleys felt relief. At the same time, they worried about the coaches and others whose conditions were still precarious. Then, there were the families dealing with the loss of their boys.

It was all too much to process. The bus driver and his wife were dead, too.

•••••

Friday night, at the Marriott Marquis Atlanta, where families were staying, a tall, lean Jamie Hausman looked composed. The baby-faced pitcher appeared not to have a scratch on his smooth skin.

A closer look revealed raw abrasions on the sides of his head, where shards of glass had peeled chunks of skin.

Ryan Baightel, the captain, had suffered a bruised right knee and abrasions on his back. When officials investigating the accident brought the team's remaining equipment to the hotel, Ryan told his parents he only wanted one thing: his glove.

Saturday, just before noon, a black shuttle bus pulled up to the crash site. Inside were family members of the injured and the dead. They'd come to see the spot for themselves, to mourn, and, in some way, to begin their own healing. Amid the blossoms tucked in what remained of the chain-link fence atop the overpass wall was a bright yellow, hand-lettered sign: "You're on God's Team Now."

About two miles away, another black shuttle bus idled in front of the entrance to the ICU wing of Piedmont Hospital. Inside, a handful of Coach Grandey's players stood near his bed. Hausman was among them.

Grandey couldn't speak, instead answering and asking questions written on a piece of paper.

He wanted to know how the boys were holding up. He told them he was worried and concerned. But most of all, he told them he was sorry.

It didn't surprise Hausman. Coach is a stand-up guy.

• This story was reconstructed through interviews with players and their parents, doctors at Grady Hospital, paramedics at the scene of the accident, Bluffton University's sports information director, and through first-hand observations. Contributing reporters: Michelle Hiskey, Rosalind Bentley, Jane Hansen, Kevin Duffy and Christian Boone.