Houston mom hopes video of daughter's close call getting off school bus will remind drivers to stop
With children returning to classes and stopped school buses once again tasked with taking students safely to and from school, one Houston woman is sharing a video of her daughter nearly being struck by a car whose driver ignored a red school bus stop sign.
Josephine Kirk-Taylor was standing on the sidewalk as she waited for her daughter to arrive home from her second day of kindergarten on Wednesday, according to ABC Houston affiliate KTRK-TV. She was taking cell phone video with her two younger children standing next to her when the school bus pulled over across the street.
As the bus stopped, Kirk-Taylor could be heard excitedly telling the other children that their sister Melina Kirk-Taylor, 5, had arrived.
"There's Melina!" she said. "There goes Melina!"
In the video, the yellow school bus stops, the red stop sign pops out — signaling to drivers behind the bus and in front of the bus to stop — and Kirk-Taylor's daughter can be seen getting off the bus and heading across the street. It was unclear from the video whether emergency lights were flashing as well.
At that moment, Kirk-Taylor could be heard yelling and screaming as a blue car flashed past her in the street.
"No! Wait! Wait! Wait!" she tells her daughter who's standing on the other side of the street. "Stop!"
The driver of the blue car does not appear in the video to hit the brakes as the car continues down the street and the video ends. Kirk-Taylor told KTRK-TV that she hoped sharing the video would remind drivers to always stop when they see a school bus dropping off children.
"It takes 10 seconds to stop so a child can cross the street," she said.
A 2017-2019 survey by the National School Bus Loading and Unloading Survey reported that six children were killed getting on or off the bus over the course of a school year.
In October, three children from the same family, including identical twin brothers, were killed and a fourth child was seriously injured when they were struck by a pickup truck as they prepared to board a school bus in Rochester, Indiana.
A preliminary investigation showed the yellow school bus had its emergency lights flashing and its stop sign out when the children were struck by the southbound truck, Indiana authorities said. The trial for the driver of the truck was expected to start in October, according to The South Bend Tribune.
