Heather spent life caring for others

The band dads, as American Fork High School band director John Miller calls them, stepped gingerly as they walked the crash site.

It was daylight on Monday, the day after the day after. They had driven to Pocatello to collect belongings that had been left behind at the hospital late Saturday night after a bus carrying their kids had careened off the freeway south of town.

Now, on the way back home, they had pulled over at the scene of the crash.

As they picked through the debris, they studied the evidence to try and determine just what happened when the bus driver blacked out. They traced the tire marks as they left the asphalt. Then they noted that the tire marks angled back toward the highway, only to stop abruptly at the shoulder where the bus obviously went airborne — obviously, because another 40 or 50 feet down the road was where all the debris was scattered.

"To them there was no question," says Miller. "Heather had control of that bus and had it going back where it belonged. If it just hadn't been for that last lip."

So Heather Christensen went out the way she came in. Stepping up, trying to help, full speed ahead, looking out for everybody and everything.

The 33-year-old band teacher who was the accident's lone fatality had jumped out of her seat, grabbed the untended steering wheel and almost made everything right again.

Nobody's happy that she died in the effort. A world that has far too few selfless people now has one less.

But doesn't it make you stop and look at your own life and think?

If a busload of school kids was careening out of control, what would I have done, and what would they be saying about me if I died in the crash?

The best we could hope for — the very best — is for the discussion to remotely approach what they're saying about Heather Christensen.

She was the prototypical drum major, the leader of the band — which is exactly what she was when she was chosen to lead the marching bands when she attended American Fork High School and the University of Utah.

But that wasn't all. You name it, she somehow crammed it into her life. In high school, she also got straight A's, helped her five siblings with their homework, played a year on the basketball team and in a rare double also was chosen to lead the a cappella choir.