The MARTA driver who was fired Friday after dragging a woman 63 feet with her bus then leaving the scene had a thick personnel file rich with reports about crashes, tardiness and rude behavior.
Until Sunday, though, Belinda McMillian, had never done anything that merited firing under MARTA rules. Her personnel file ran a stunning 420 pages. She once rammed a parked car hard enough to slam it into another vehicle, she clipped the mirror of another parked car and she had an abusive mouth if the dozens of passenger complaints are to be believed. But she hadn't broken enough rules badly enough to get canned.
What finally did her in was her own sworn statements after Sunday's incident. Lettie Robinson, a mumbling 62-year-old passenger with a walker, was left bruised and bloodied after police said she was dragged with an arm stuck in the closed bus doors. Robinson said she'd left her purse on the bus and was going back to get it when McMillian took off.
McMillian, in statements to police and MARTA authorities, contradicted herself, saying at one point that Robinson wasn't a passenger and at another point that she saw her get off the bus. That was one cause for dismissal.
MARTA Assistant General Manager Mary Ann Jackson summed up the other cause: McMillian admitted driving away after she saw Robinson fall to the ground.
"There was an accident, the woman was injured and the driver failed to call communications and left the scene," Jackson said.
The manager said the compendium of complaints against the former driver was unusually thick, but said the MARTA rules, negotiated with the employee's union, established a high bar for firing.
A driver must have three preventable accidents on file within a rolling 2-year period to get booted. McMillian's preventable accidents, such as the parked-car collisions, were spread out over her eight years at the transit agency. The bar is higher with lesser offenses, such as tardiness and sassing riders. McMillian was suspended for being late, and her file was full of allegations of verbal abuse.
Officials at the Amalgamated Transit Union could not be reached for comment Friday. McMillian did not return messages seeking comment.
McMillian wasn't all bad in the eyes of passengers. A handful praised her for handling difficult riders with poise and politeness. One labeled the North Avenue bus route that McMillian drove the "ghetto bus" because it was full of cussing, abusive passengers.
"I cannot imagine driving and listening to this type of language," the passenger wrote to MARTA officials after she said McMillian handled an angry woman well in 2005.
But the praise is far outweighed by the complaints.
One woman complained in 2009 about a crass comment she claimed McMillian had made when the woman boarded McMillian's bus near Grady Memorial Hospital. This is how the call taker who handled the woman's complaint wrote it up, misspellings and all:
"She says when she boarded the bus @ Marietta & Broad the driver ask her if she was going to Grady. She was offended, and said why are you asking me that. She says the operator said mabe because you have aids in the boody."
That complaint, like many of them, was deemed "not valid" by MARTA authorities.
In another incident, a man who was waiting for a bus with his fiance near Georgia Tech in 2006 complained that McMillian gave an "ugly" response when he asked if she was heading toward town, then closed the bus door on his shoulder several times. Last November, a passenger at a bus terminal waited 10 minutes for the driver before getting out and knocking on the break room door. McMillian answered, and when the passenger asked whether she were the driver, she reportedly responded: "If it was me driving the route #50, I would have you wait another 10 minutes just for asking."
McMillian's tone in her written responses to complaints indicated her attitude clearly enough. She seemed to be dismissive of one rider who claimed to be injured after McMillian came to a sudden stop when, she wrote, a car cut her off. She said all passengers but one said they were OK.
"One lady was acting as if she was trying to be in labor, so another lady on board called 911 for a paramedic," McMillian wrote of the 2003 incident. "And they came, and got her."
MARTA says McMillian was a problem employee. There was the tardiness and the history of absences. And then there were all those "little things" that added up to an unusually thick file, Jackson said. Last year, McMillian was among about three dozen MARTA drivers placed into a retraining program.
"We went through and chose the ones with the worst records," Jackson said. She said McMillian was an aberration. Most of the agency's 1,200 drivers are kind and courteous, she said, willing to get out of a bus to help an elderly woman cross the street.
"This gives us all a black eye and it was so unnecessary," Jackson said of Sunday's dragging incident. "We've got hundreds of employees who would not dream of doing something like this."
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