School district sued for discrimination after bus driver drives 150 feet with boy wedged in doors

The mother of a biracial boy reportedly filed a lawsuit against his Utah school district after a bus driver was captured on video earlier this year shutting the doors on her son’s backpack and leaving him swinging as he drove approximately 150 feet.

According to The Salt Lake Tribune, the mother, Brenda Mayes, on Tuesday filed suit in U.S. District Court against the Davis School District, the bus driver and the local transportation director for racial discrimination.

The lawsuit stems from a February incident in which Mayes’s son, who is in the seventh grade, could be seen on video getting trapped in the doors of his school bus and left swinging as his bus driver took off.

{mosads}In footage of the incident, Mayes’s son can be seen on the bus walking in a line of 13 other students, each of whom are reportedly white, before getting ready to exit the bus. By the time he prepares to walk off the bus, a number of other children could be seen standing behind him before the bus driver shuts the doors.

The boy, who was reportedly the only person of color on the bus, was trapped in the bus doors for roughly 20 seconds before the driver heeded the other students’ calls and stopped the bus.

Mayes told The Salt Lake Tribune that she “was blown away” by the incident. “I was angry. The driver knew what he was doing,” she said.

According to the newspaper, the driver, John Naisbitt, has a history of allegations claiming that he has targeted other students of multiracial ethnicities. He has not faced disciplinary actions by the school districts for other of the allegations, but has since retired from his post.

A spokeswoman for the school district told the paper that “when issues of discrimination are raised at any time, they are investigated thoroughly.”

“We take any claims of racial discrimination seriously and do not tolerate any form of racial discrimination in our schools,” she added.

Naisbitt rejected claims that he intentionally closed the doors on Mayes’s son due to his race in an interview with a local Fox station.

“I didn’t see him in there,” he said. “If I had, I would have stopped.” 

When pressed by the station about if he would call himself racist, Naisbitt replied, “Not at all. No. Look at my dog. He’s as black as could be.”