Parents of boy beat up on CMS bus question student safety

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Parents of a boy who was seen getting beat up on video while on a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools bus are worried that bus drivers are not doing enough to protect children.

The parents of the 8-year-old boy said the attack happened while he was on a bus on his way home from school sometime last fall. They didn't know about it until they checked his cellphone last week and saw the video.

“They were pummeling my kid,” his father, Curtis McNeil, said.

McNeil said the incident may have started as a game, with older students encouraging his son and another boy to fight.

The incident turned violent.

“I mean, they were just all over him,” McNeil said. “He was scared. “You could see it in his face.”

McNeil went to the principal at Morehead Elementary School where his son is a student to let them know what he had seen and to ask what they're doing about it.

He asked the principal if the students involved or the bus driver who let it happen would be disciplined.

“They say they're going to handle it their way. They don't want us to know what's going on,” McNeil said.

The boy’s parents took him off the afternoon bus.

“It's a savage kind of world we're living in where people want to videotape a fight where people are getting hurt,” McNeil said. “It's savage.”

McNeill is convinced that the bullying has stopped but he's also convinced that his son isn't the only one who has gone through it.

Cox Media Group