Police say Anthony Stuckey was driving the bus on Passaic Avenue in West Caldwell just after 8:30 a.m. when it left the roadway and collided with a home just north of Terrace Place.
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"I was making a right turn at the light when I saw the bus flying right into the house," eyewitness Karen Zieleniewski said. "It was so loud. It just went into the house and a huge boom and that was it."
Another driver swerved to get out of the way of the bus and ended up in an accident of their own. Their car suffered front-end damage.
Stuckey had just dropped students off at West Caldwell Tech High School and was the only one on the bus at the time.
"When he jumped out of the back of the bus, I went over, I was the first responder. (I tried) to get him to sit down and he got a little disoriented," a woman who did not want to be identified said.
The owner, Professor Siva Thangam, a mechanical engineer at Stevens Institute of Technology, had left around 5 a.m. and said the bus struck a second bedroom, but no one was inside the home at the time of the crash.
"I got a call at 9:15. I couldn't make it here before, I just came," Thangam said. "The first bedroom was also damaged, you can see it, but I was not there anyway."
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Thangam said there was significant structural and foundation damage.
"It's a busy road, it's a little dangerous. They recently put up these guardrails right here to protect some of these houses because there was another crash a couple of years ago," resident Nicole Perez said.
Stuckey was arrested at the scene for suspicion of driving while intoxicated.
He was later charged with a number of charges including driving while intoxicated and 15 counts of endangering the welfare of a child.
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