Witnesses describe how the Quebec daycare bus crash unfolded, moment by moment

Witnesses recount the moments before and after a city bus crashed into a daycare in Laval, Que., killing two children.

It was just before 8:30 a.m. Wednesday when André Beaudoin pulled into the parking lot to bring his two-year-old son to daycare. The Garderie Éducative Ste-Rose in Laval, Que., was busy, with parents stopping to drop off their children for the day.

The sound of an engine revving was Beaudoin's first signal that something wasn't right. He looked up and saw a city bus barrelling down the driveway before it smashed into the front of the daycare, into the room where the oldest children — the four- and five-year-olds — gather.

What happened in the minutes and hours that followed would resonate across the country, culminating in a tragedy that left two four-year-old children dead, six children in hospital and a city bus driver with an unremarkable history facing charges of first-degree murder.

While police are still piecing together what happened, witness accounts gathered over the two days following the accident provide a harrowing account of those first moments.

Hamdi Benchaabane, who lives next door to the daycare, quickly knew something was wrong. He's used to watching buses slowly navigate the roundabout at the end of his dead-end street to pull up at the bus stop in front of his house. This one instead made a sharp turn into the daycare's driveway and headed straight for the building at a speed he estimates was 30 or 40 kilometres an hour.

In the seconds following the impact, Beaudoin, Benchaabane and another parent from the parking lot, Mike Haddad, sprinted into the shattered building.

Beaudoin began pushing through concrete and debris from the walls and partly collapsed ceiling and pulling injured children from under the bus in a scene he would later describe as "the worst thing in the world."