LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — SirPatrick Coleman is 5-years-old in the first grade. His favorite subject is math. He keeps his neon bus tag attached to his backpack. It corresponds with the bus he’s supposed to take to and from school.
But on Monday he says he was scared when the bus driver dropped him off at the wrong stop and left him with no parent and no other children around.
“I cried, and I tried to walk home,” SirPatrick said.
Less than half a mile up North Rainbow Road, SirPatrick’s mother, Sadie, waited and waited for his school bus that never arrived.
“No parent should have to be worried about where their kid is,” Sadie said.
Sadie called his school, Ruthe Deskin Elementary. No one answered.
Then she remembered at the beginning of the school year she signed a consent form for a protocol in this situation.
“If a kid is not picked up, or if there’s no one there to get him off the bus, the procedure usually takes them to a Boys and Girls Club,” Sadie said.
However, that didn’t happen either.
After driving to multiple Boys and Girls Clubs, the school principal and Las Vegas Metropolitan Police were involved. For two hours, Sadie searched the area for her son, until finally, the police called her back.
“A good samaritan, when she went to the store, he was sitting there on the gate,” Sadie retells what officers told her. “When she came back he was still sitting there on the gate, but this time he was crying, so she stopped and pulled over and called the police and waited for the police to come.”
Sadie was told the bus driver made a wrong turn and therefore dropped SirPatrick off at the wrong bus stop.
But Sadie wants more information. She says Clark County School District Transportation told her there was a shortage of school bus drivers forcing them to call on a driver from another yard. But she says they didn’t know who that bus driver was.
“What if something worse had happened?! Then would you be able to tell me who was driving the school bus and where you dropped my child off at?!” Sadie said.
“I’m trying to fight the tears. It just makes me so, so mad.”
13 Action News reached out to CCSD Transportation, but our messages have not yet been returned.
DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE | Reporter Rachel Moore digs deeper in the Daily Debrief
