UPS hero driver was . . . At the right place - at the right time

UPS supervisor Peter Aruta wasn’t supposed to be on a delivery route in Little Neck on Tuesday, May 1. But another supervisor wasn’t able to make it that afternoon, so Aruta, a UPS employee since 1989, filled in.
“My partner is usually in that area. It was a fluke that I was there,” Aruta said. “I consider myself fortunate that I was able to help.”
That day, as Aruta was trying to make a left onto Douglaston Parkway from Rushmore Avenue, as an allegedly stolen silver SUV sped by with a police car behind giving chase. About 30 seconds later, Aruta heard the sounds of a collision.
“As soon as I made a left, I heard the sound of impact,” he said, explaining that he then spotted the smashed school bus.
“When I got to the bus, they were all screaming, ‘Help us, help us,’” he remembered. “I was glad that none of the kids got hurt. Thank God they were wearing their seatbelts.”
The windshield had been jarred loose, and Aruta and two police officers were going to try to pull children out through that opening until they noticed a little girl hanging from her seatbelt in the middle of the bus. After pulling the girl up through one of the school bus windows with the help of one of the officers, Aruta, the cops, and fellow hero John Anatra verbally guided one of the children to pull the emergency lever on the back door.
Then with all of the children - special education students of the Lowell School in Bayside - sprawled on the ground, Aruta tried to be of assistance to the EMTs, talking with the shaken matron and driver and holding the hand of a little girl who had several cuts from the crash.
Because emergency service vehicles surrounded the site, Aruta had to wait until after all the cars had pulled away to finish all but one of his deliveries, which was only two houses down from the crash site.
When asked if he had many more deliveries that afternoon, Aruta laughed, “Are you kidding, of course. We go all day.”
Still, Aruta said he was happy to have been able to help. His own children - 10-year-old daughter, Alexa, and 11-year-old son, Peter - are about the same age of the children he rescued.
When Aruta finally got a chance to call his wife, Candice, at their home in Hauppauge, Long Island, the family already knew what Aruta had done that day by watching TV.
“When you are running over to a bus on its side with kids on it and with women on it, the last thing you are thinking about is that you’re going to be on the news,” Aruta said. “It’s a big thing for them [his family].”
Incidentally, the news crews on the scene might not have even interviewed Aruta had he not returned to the crash site after heading out to Long Island.
While he had climbed on top of the bus to free the dangling little girl, Aruta’s glasses slipped off his head and dropped inside, so after dropping off the rest of his deliveries, Aruta made his way back to the scene of the accident in Little Neck to see if the glasses were still there.
“I never expected to see my glasses again,” he laughed. “I need them to see the numbers on the houses at night. But I got them back.”