NEW YORK – A mother is demanding answers after her 6-year-old daughter was found crying and alone while wandering the streets a mile from her Staten Island school, where she was supposed to drop her off on her school bus.
“I put her on the bus every morning at 7:50,” mom Jenna Carlsen said.
But she said her daughter Jayde never came to school on May 27. Instead, she received a phone call from a stranger saying that she had found her daughter, who Carlsen didn’t even know was missing.
“He said, ‘I have your daughter at Quintard and Mason.’ I said you have to have the wrong girl. My daughter doesn’t go to school there,” Carlsen told NBC New York.
But it was his daughter. Instead of ending up in her PS 39 kindergarten class, the girl was a mile away, scared and alone, near Ocean Breeze Park.
“She fell asleep. She’s in the back, behind the emergency exit door,” Carlsen said.
When Jayde woke up, she found herself inside a closed bus.
“He came out the back and walked across the street toward this woman,” Carlsen said.
That woman was Ashley Paris, a mother who had just dropped her 10-year-old son off at school and was driving home down a secluded side street.
“I saw a little girl crying hysterically, and as soon as I stopped at the stop sign, she ran to my car and grabbed the window,” Paris said. “And (she) said, ‘Please don’t leave me, everyone has left me.'”
Paris contacted Carlsen and brought her daughter home.
“To see a girl like that knowing that if she were my daughter, she would want someone like me to help her. It was very sad,” Paris said.
As for Carlsen, he said of Paris: “I owe this woman my life.”
But that’s where his words of gratitude end and the anger towards the bus company and the driver begins. She is furious that both the bus driver and the bus manager allowed it to happen on a bus with less than 10 children on board.
“I called the bus driver, I cussed him out. Possibly everything that could get out, got out,” Carlsen said. “How long does it take to walk down the aisle to make sure there’s no one on the bus? … It could have been a totally different way. She could have gotten some crazy fucking person to have kidnapped her.”
The driver initially tried to deny it, Carlsen said, never apologized and has since kept quiet.
“The bus driver said ‘Thank God he’s home safe.’ Yes, thank God, he’s right, because he would be knocking on your door,” Carlsen told NBC New York.
Police confirmed that the irate mother filed a child endangerment complaint and that the incident is being investigated. The company that operates the bus, Island Charter Bus Company, declined to comment. A call to the company returned “no comment” before the person hung up.
In reports, the city’s Department of Education described the situation as unacceptable and said a new route and driver have been set for Jayde. It was not known if they were still using the Island Charter Bus Company, or if the driver and matron still work with children.
Carlsen said he was told the two were suspended. But she said none of that does her any good, since her daughter is now terrified to go to school.
“She’s been throwing up, and before I told the pediatrician, she asked me if something was wrong, because she was having post-traumatic symptoms,” Carlsen said. “It’s sad, like I’m still supposed to trust you with my son?”
–
