Woman explains alleged incident of pruning shears on school bus

A woman charged in October with breaking a school bus window with pruning shears says she can't understand why she wasn't allowed to remove her special-needs son from the bus when he arrived home from school.

Kinyinna Stevenson, 35, of Cape Girardeau was tased and arrested by police officers after her Oct. 21 attempt to get her son off the bus and was subsequently charged with property damage and resisting arrest.

Stevenson said the incident started about 3:10 p.m. after a school bus arrived at her home at 1914 College St. to drop off her 7-year-old, Tyrus, who suffers from Rubenstein-Taybi syndrome. When the bus stopped in front of her home, Stevenson said she went to the bus door to collect her son, but the driver would not open the door for her.

"I was standing at the bus door wondering why they wouldn't open it," she said. "I could see Tyrus at the top of the steps."

According to the probable-cause statement by Sgt. Rodney Barker of the Cape Girardeau Police Department, Stevenson's son is required to be picked up at the curb, but on that day she had stopped 10 feet away from the door and began video-recording the bus on her cell phone. The statement said the bus driver contacted bus dispatch and the monitor contacted her supervisor after Stevenson began recording, but the statement does not say what directions were relayed.

"I visually recorded some of the incident on my phone," she said. "But it's now lost."

Stevenson said after she had tried for about 15 minutes to get the driver to open the door, she stepped back and called the Cape Girardeau School District and the police. The person at the district didn't call back, Stevenson said, and she called the police again because they hadn't arrived yet.

After what she said was 35 minutes of trying to get her son off the bus, Stevenson said she felt "enough was enough."

"I went over to the bus driver's window and he rolled up the window," she said. "I was screaming, ‘I want my son.' I was crying."

Stevenson said she went inside her home and came out of the garage with a pair of pruning shears to get the bus driver's attention. "I used them to tap on the bus' window," she said, "and then the bus starts to drive off."

Stevenson hit the window hard enough for it to break. As the bus began to drive away, she reached through the broken window to grab a railing inside the bus.

"I kept saying that my son was disabled and that I wanted him off the bus," she said. "I wasn't going to let them take him away."

The police arrived and arrested Stevenson.

"I wanted my son back, and they were arresting me," she said. "I was even tased. I was taken to the police station and was later charged with property damage and resisting arrest."

Stevenson said she could receive two years of supervised probation for her actions.

"It's sad when you see your child screaming, and he can't go to his mommy," she said.

klewis@semissourian.com

388-3635

Pertinent address: 1914 College St., Cape Girardeau, MO