A MARTA bus driver has been placed on administrative leave after being accused of driving off and dragging a passenger about six feet because she refused to get completely on the bus, the transit agency said Tuesday.
"He says, 'Get on the bus or you're gonna get left,' DeKalb resident Mira Burton told Channel 2 Action News. "And I said, 'Sir, someone else is coming,' and he said, 'You're about to get left,' and that's when I got drug."
MARTA spokesman Lyle Harris identified the driver as Jesse Grayer, who has been with the transit agency since 1996.
Harris said Grayer has been placed on paid leave while the agency investigates the incident. “We are in the process of reviewing Mr. Grayer’s personnel record, but he has no other complaints that have been found to be valid,” Harris said in a statement.
Harris said once a bus has pulled away, drivers are instructed not to stop. The spokesman added, however, that if an operator is at a stop and is aware that someone is attempting to board the bus, “they are expected to wait.”
Burton said she was running to catch the Route 121 MARTA bus on Friday morning across the street from the Kensington station in DeKalb County when she caught up with the bus and was partially inside the door.
She told Channel 2 she had stopped to catch her breath in the door of the bus, with one foot on and the other on the sidewalk, when the driver demanded she get on, and then moments later pulled off when she didn’t.
“Everyone on the bus was just enraged,” Burton recalled. “They were saying, ‘That was wrong. You could have killed her.’”
At least one passenger took cellphone video of the incident, according to Channel 2.
“MARTA has been in contact with the customer who made the complaint and the cellphone videographer who was a passenger on the bus,” Harris said. ”MARTA takes these allegations very seriously and is conducting a full investigation.”
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