This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
If you've ever tried to get to St. Bonaventure University in Olean, New York, you know how hard that is. Tucked into a remote corner of southwestern New York, it's about a 90-minute drive to the nearest major airport in Buffalo or a 40-minute drive to a regional airport in Bradford, Pennsylvania, that can handle charter flights. So it's never a hotly anticipated road trip for any college basketball team, for reasons that go beyond the fact that the Bonnies' fans are underrated in their rowdiness.
Now just imagine you're a college basketball team playing at St. Bonaventure and the bus driver tasked with getting you to the airport absconds with all your stuff. That just happened to the Saint Louis men.
The Billikens suffered a 70-55 loss to the Bonnies on Wednesday night, which was bad enough, but when they went to depart for the airport after the game they found that their bus was missing, along with all of their belongings onboard.
Thanks to the fact that Saint Louis Coach Travis Ford was able to track the location of his iPad, which had remained on the bus, police eventually found the driver about 40 miles west of Olean in Randolph, New York. The driver who had taken the team to the arena, Linda Edmister, was given a sobriety test on the side of the road and registered a blood alcohol level of 0.22, well above the legal limit in New York.
Soon the Billikens were taken on a different bus to the original bus to collect their belongings. Nothing appeared to be taken.
"We are headed toward it now on different bus, have to get our stuff off other bus!! CRAZY!!!" Ford wrote in a text message to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Stu Durando at around 11 p.m. EST.