WHAS11 coverage

The Carrollton bus crash: 20 years later

More WHAS11 coverage | Continued Coverage

1988 WHAS11 coverage of the Carrollton bus crash | 2 | 3

Slideshow: 20 years after the Carrollton bus crash

Letters from drunk driver to crash survivor | 2 | 3

Unlikely friendship between the drunk driver and a survivor

(WHAS11) - As survivors and victims’ families mark the 20^th anniversary of the Carrollton bus crash, the man who prosecuted Larry Mahoney is remembering as well.

Paul Richwalsky is now an assistant Jefferson County attorney.  In 1988, after the local prosecutor suffered a heart attack, Richwalsky was called in to prosecute Larry Mahoney. 

Immediately he was the visiting team which was an immediate disadvantage to prosecuting the case.

“If those were Carroll County kids who had been killed or maimed or injured, and the people on that jury would have to face those parents, at Kroger, at Wal-mart… you wonder, and even though that shouldn’t have anything to do with it, it does,” says Richwalsky.

But he does not regret that they didn’t ask for a change of venue.

“If you lose, you’re pretty much cooked, you’re pretty much done because you’ve already announced to the world that you good folks can’t be fair,” he says.

He says everything was stacked against the prosecution, a major crime scene, a disaster on an interstate which had to be re-open.

Witnesses had to be brought back from across the country.

And what was it like in the courtroom? 

“I’m sure it was very hard for him to sit there and listen to everything, every burn, every life, everything.  I know the man didn’t do it on purpose,” says crash survivor Katrina Muller Johnson.

Johnson says she was the first to forgive Mahoney with a note sent from her hospital bed and again on the stand.

But it would cost her, as defense attorneys targeted her and her family received angry mail.