Six Nonverbal Students Missing for Hours on Brooklyn Bus

For more than four hours on a December morning, six young children who cannot speak for themselves were somewhere in Brooklyn on a school bus that was not going where it was supposed to go. A report released Oct. 16 by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for the New York City School District (SCI) lays out what happened, and the agency’s chief called it “highly disturbing.”

According to SCI, the students, ages 6 to 8, all nonverbal and with special needs, were due at P.S. 289, known as the Brower School, in Crown Heights between 8:20 and 9 a.m. on Dec. 16, 2025. They did not arrive until about 1:25 p.m. By then, school officials had already contacted the Department of Education’s Office of Pupil Transportation and the NYPD.

The alarm was first raised by a parent. She had tucked AirTags into her two children’s backpacks, and she noticed the bus moving between different Brooklyn locations rather than heading to school. She alerted SCI. School staff, meanwhile, repeatedly tried to reach the bus company, Consolidated Bus Transit Inc., a Brooklyn-based DOE vendor. A dispatcher finally called back at 11:45 a.m., SCI found, saying the bus was “lost” but would arrive within 15 minutes. It took roughly another hour and 40 minutes.

When school personnel boarded, they found one student lying flat on a seat, soaking wet after urinating on herself. The investigation says she had removed her urine-soaked diaper and leggings.

The timeline also appears to conflict with the driver’s account. GPS data SCI obtained from the Office of Pupil Transportation shows the bus was still at one student’s home address as late as 10:59 a.m., even though the driver had stated that every child had been picked up by 10 a.m.

Bus matron Germina Thomas told investigators that some of the nonverbal students grew agitated during the long ride while others slept through it. She also acknowledged that she never spoke with driver Eric Chery during the ordeal and made no attempt to contact the school or the bus depot. SCI recommended that both Chery and Thomas be permanently barred from supervising DOE students or working for the DOE or any of its vendors.

SCI Commissioner Anastasia Coleman said in a statement that these “particularly vulnerable students rely on the adults entrusted with their care to ensure their safety,” adding that every child, including those with special needs, deserves safe, reliable and timely transportation to school.

Elected officials weighed in with calls for accountability. Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, whose son is autistic, said the incident “completely betrays” the trust families place in bus staff each morning, and that the only way to begin making amends is to ensure the two employees never again care for DOE students. Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat who previously chaired the Committee on Oversight and Investigations, noted that she held hearings on school bus delays in November 2022, when 350 buses experienced delays daily. “This is not an isolated situation,” she said.

Brooklyn Council Member Lincoln Restler called it “disturbing and unacceptable” that students with special needs were delivered four hours late, and urged the city to hold bus operators accountable for the 150,000 public school students who rely on them.

Consolidated Bus Transit Inc. did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to the Brooklyn Paper, which first reported the findings.