A 13-year-old girl sustained a broken collarbone after being pushed out of the back of a moving school bus by a belligerent classmate on Friday afternoon in Brownsville. The Daily News reports that Amore-Virginia Peterson was headed home from the Brooklyn Children’s Center, a school for disabled kids, when pandemonium broke out on the bus. First a classmate spit at her and threw books at her, and then, when a bus matron told her to withdraw to the back of the bus for her safety, another boy charged at her and shoved her out of the bus.
“He jumped over the seats and pushed me to the back door,” Peterson, a bipolar sixth-grader, told the News. “Then he pushed the door open and pushed me out. I thought I was going to die.” Peterson landed on the street and managed to run out of the way of oncoming traffic. But her unidentified assailant chased her into a barbershop, where employees separated the two until paramedics arrived. Amore-Virginia was then taken to Brookdale University Hospital and treated for her broken collarbone and other injuries. A hair braid was also torn out of her head.
A DOE spokesman tells the News that the boy faces disciplinary action from the Brooklyn Children's Center, but Peterson's mother says she's so afraid for her daughter's safety that she is trying to move her to a different school, if only to get her on a different bus route. And this has been your monthly reminder of how much it used to suck taking the bus to school.
