A school bus monitor in New Jersey has been charged in the death of a 6-year-old girl with special needs who died after a harness restraining the girl to her wheelchair fatally suffocated her without the monitor’s knowledge, authorities said Thursday.
Amanda Davila, 26, of New Brunswick, was arrested and charged days after the deadly incident Monday, Somerset County District Attorney John McDonald’s office said.
Authorities were called to a local school that day on a report of an unresponsive minor. When they arrived, officers performed CPR on the girl before taking her to the intensive care unit at a local hospital. She was later pronounced dead, the McDonald’s office said.
An investigation revealed that the girl, who had special needs, was sitting in her wheelchair in the back of the bus on her way to school. Her wheelchair had been secured by Dávila, who was assigned as a school bus monitor, the McDonald’s office said.
During the trip, a series of potholes in the roads caused the 6-year-old to collapse in her wheelchair, causing the 4-point harness that held her to the chair to tighten around her neck and eventually block her airway, the county attorney’s office said.
As the tragedy unfolded, Dávila was sitting in the front of the bus and had been using a cell phone while wearing headphones, which the county attorney’s office said was a “violation of policies and procedures.”
At some point it was discovered that the girl was unresponsive.
Davila was arrested at the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office without incident Wednesday, he said. She has been charged with manslaughter in the second degree and endangering the welfare of a child in the second degree.
Davila was being held at the Somerset County Jail awaiting a detention hearing beginning Thursday. It was not immediately clear if he has an attorney.
The girl’s family, who was born with a rare chromosomal disorder known as Emanuel syndrome, which prevented her from talking or walking, vowed to do everything possible to ensure something like this never happens again. NBC New York informed.
The girl’s father, Wali Williams, said the girl “had no oxygen to her brain for almost 40 minutes.”
“Do you understand the image we had in our head of our daughter the last time we saw her? What we had to go through?” she told NBC New York.
“She was the sweetest little girl you’d ever meet,” said Namjah Nash Williams, her mother. She “she had the sweetest laugh, little dimples and she just put up with a lot in her six years.”
“Being taken from us like that, that had nothing to do with his condition,” he said. “This will never happen again if I have someone say so.”
