Drunk School Bus Driver Crashes Into Pole With Kids On-Board
A drunken school bus driver hit a telephone pole with 35 high school students on-board in suburban New York Monday morning.
Mary Coletti, 56, was driving the students to Walter Panas High School in Cortlandt when she was arrested on felony drunk driving charges.
Her blood alcohol level was.13, that’s.05 points higher than the legal limit for drunk driving.
A few of her students suffered minor injuries from the crash and one high school student told ABC 7 Coletti was acting strangely and swerving all over the road.
“I thought we weren’t going to make it because she was going so slowly, and I didn’t think we were going to make it up the hill you have to push it, and then somehow she was just going up the curve and she hits the telephone pole.”
Lakeland Superintendent George Stone told the USA Today Coletti’s bus driver license had been terminated.
“As a district that places our very highest priority on the safety and security of our students, we’re very concerned about what happened. We are going to cooperate with the police in their investigation. We’re conducting our own investigation as well and plan to take all appropriate actions as necessary.”
He said the district conducts safety programs and drug and alcohol screening to prevent this type of accident, but Coletti must have slipped through.
She was sent to jail with $1,000 bail and is due back in court May 18. She’ll be facing charges under Leandra’s Law, a 2009 New York law that specifies tougher penalties for people who drive drunk with kids onboard.
Coletti isn’t the first school bus driver to be arrested for drunk driving; she’s not even the first this year.
In February, a school bus driver in Allegany County, New York was arrested for drunk driving with a blood alcohol level of.15 after she sped through town at 70 miles per hour and hit a mailbox.
Security footage of the event shows the children on her bus pleading with her to pull over and stop, according to the San Francisco Globe.
Last year in August, a school bus driver in Connecticut was arrested for drunk driving with a blood alcohol level of.139 after a police officer saw her swerving all over the road, according to the Inquisitr.
She was charged with 20 counts of risking injury to a minor, one for each child on her bus.
[Photo by John Moore/David McNew/Getty Images]
