A 12-year-old South Side girl slept overnight on a school bus when the driver and his aide failed to notice her sleeping or hiding in the back of the bus, police said Thursday.
Ironically, the girl’s ordeal may have been “a blessing,” police said, because it led them to the squalid house where she lived with three siblings, her mother and 73-year-old grandmother. Police removed all four children from the home and placed them with the state Department of Children and Family Services.
Police charged the bus driver, Sam Davis, 38, of 7235 S. Artesian Ave., with one count of endangering a child’s health. They charged Verdell Love, 73, of 8458 S. Constance Ave., with four counts of child neglect. And they likely will charge the mother–if they can find her–with four counts of child neglect, said Chicago Police Youth Investigator Dan Gerzyb.
The bus driver and the child welfare attendant have been suspended with pay and could be fired pending an investigation into why they apparently neglected their duties to make sure all students were off the bus, said Woody Fitzmaurice, manager of student transportation for the Chicago Public Schools.
The girl’s mother reported her missing at 11 p.m. Wednesday, “about 7 1/2 hours after she should have been home,” Gerzyb said.
The girl, who has Down’s syndrome, was a special education student at Park Manor Elementary School, 7037 S. Rhodes Ave., Gerzyb said.
Usually the girl did not take a bus home with the five or six regular student passengers, Fitzmaurice said. On Wednesday, the usual van was in the shop so the bus driver brought a standard big yellow school bus and the girl got in.
“After all the kids are dropped off, the child welfare attendant is supposed to check the bus for any kids, but she failed to do this,” Fitzmaurice said. “Instead, she was just dropped off at home. The bus driver is supposed to check every seat in the bus when he returns to the bus yard and ends his work shift. But the driver failed to perform this assignment.”
The girl apparently was on the bus in the fenced-in parking lot of the White Transportation Co., 8146 S. Racine Ave., from 3:30 or 4 p.m. Wednesday when the bus driver ended his shift until 5:30 a.m. Thursday when a White employee arrived to warm up the buses.
He found the girl sleeping in a seat. She said she was cold, so he took her to a warm bus, Fitzmaurice said. She could not tell the employee her name, but she remembered her bus driver’s name and company employees figured out who she was.
Police arrived and took the girl to Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park.
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“She was laughing and joking,” Gerzyb said. “She did not really comprehend what had happened to her.”
The grandmother and the girl’s three younger siblings went to meet her at the hospital. Gerzyb and partner Martin Novak went to the home to look for the girl’s mother.
They reported that when they inspected the home, they found garbage strewn about, a toilet overflowing with waste and toilet paper, and food in open containers throughout the house, Novak said.
“The bus she slept in last night was cleaner than the house she lived in, so it’s a blessing in a way that it happened–there’s no way any kid should have to live in those conditions,” Novak said.
Police pulled the mother’s arrest record and found it was three pages long. They checked with DCFS to see if the agency had been called in before because of complaints about her mothering skills.
“They attach a (letter) suffix to every case and she was up to `M,’ ” Gerzyb said.
DCFS spokeswoman Delores Walton confirmed the family had a long history with DCFS and said a DCFS worker had visited the family in the last several days.
The worker found the house “untidy, but not filthy,” Walton said. “What (the caseworker) stated to me was that the mother was in the process of cleaning during that visit.”
“Any DCFS worker that was in there in the last couple of days and left those kids in there should be arrested,” Gerzyb said.
The children will be placed with relatives if any are available to take them in, Walton said. Otherwise they will be placed in foster care.