School Bus Missing 4 ½-Hours – Families Shaken

School Bus Missing 4 ½-Hours – Families Shaken

With the start of a new school year, this incident should be a reminder of the potential threat of school bus terrorism , and why parents should be vigilant in knowing who they are entrusting their children with each day.

Madinat Koroma was frantic: It was after 9 p.m., more than five hours after the school day had ended at the Achievement First Brownsville charter school, and she was still waiting at the bus stop for her daughter, Victoria Adewale, 5, a kindergartner.

As the bus rambled through Brooklyn, meanwhile, Victoria’s mind was on her parents.

“I was worried about my mother and father, that they were going to miss me,” Victoria, who was one of three children deposited at the school about 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, said softly on Wednesday afternoon. “I was the last one on the bus.”

It is any parent’s nightmare: The yellow school bus that so many parents rely on to ferry their children to and from school simply does not show up on time — not an hour late, not two hours late, but about five hours late for some.

School officials told parents, in a letter sent home on Wednesday, that they could not reach the bus driver on his cellphone for more than two hours. After several parents, including Ms. Koroma’s husband, Charles Adewale, called the police, the bus driver was finally reached, and ordered to return to the school, where he deposited Victoria and two of her schoolmates. The bus had started out with at least two dozen kindergartners and first-graders.

According to the police, the driver, whom they identified as Joseph Gray, 53, said he had gotten lost. He was arrested on charges of acting in a manner that is injurious to a child under 17 years of age, the police said. But a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said on Wednesday that it would not prosecute the driver because the statute requires that “the suspect acted in a manner that is knowingly injurious to a child.”

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