BOY FALLS OUT OF "PARTY BUS." LAWS NEEDED

By Dan Rattiner

Thirty-five members of the senior class at Hampton Bays High School, knowing that their school days with their friends would be soon coming to end on graduation day in June, hired a party bus last Saturday night. Let the good times roll.

I don't know what they told their parents or even if their parents knew, but some of those in the limousine business in these parts have these big Greyhound buses equipped with sofas and ice and a TV and can take people anywhere they want to go and as the saying goes, whatever happens in the back of the bus stays in the back of the bus.

Of course, bus companies require that those renting a party bus be over 18, take responsibility and agree that if there are people 17 or under there, they won't smoke or drink on the bus. Those are the conditions that are in effect when hiring a party bus. There is no law that says you need a chaperone. There might have been such a law years ago. But there is none now. There's only the driver.

In any case, this past Saturday night, this party bus, loaded with liquor and kids who are for the most part 17 and a few 18, was being driven down the Montauk Highway near Westlake Drive in Montauk when a kid fell out of the bus and was very seriously injured.

The boy, a popular 17-year-old named Erick Jimenez, was sitting on the top of the seat back of one of the sofas leaning against the glass window when, suddenly, he disappeared.

In the midst of all the good times, it almost went unnoticed. A few people had seen him up there and had turned away and now they looked again and he was gone.

"Where did Erick go?" one of the kids asked.

The consensus was he was hiding behind one of the seats as a joke. People got up and looked for him. But he wasn't there. Then somebody said he had seen him fall out of the bus. He'd fallen through the window. But the window was still there.

"It opened, he fell out, and it closed again," this person said. It was one of those exit windows.

During all of this, the bus driver was continuing on toward the lighthouse. (This was a "sightseeing" trip.) People yelled for him to stop, stop. And so he slowed down and came to a halt by the side of the road.

Meanwhile, Jimenez, who had fallen 10 feet to the pavement, lay severely injured in the dark, right in the road.

Quite by chance, but unbeknownst to those in the bus, there had been someone in a car following behind the bus who had seen what had happened.

The car pulled up to the spot where Jimenez lay, keeping him safe from any oncoming traffic, and the driver got out and quickly called 911 on his cell phone. The police responded to the call within minutes.

As for the bus driver, still on the side of the road, but now responding to the urging of the kids and to the flashing lights he could now see in his rear view mirror, turned the bus around and headed back.

As he did, various bottles of liquor and beer were thrown out the windows of the bus by the kids (the booze was found later by the police) either at the request of one of the older kids or at the request of the bus driver himself. (This was what some parents were told by their children.)

Jimenez was lying in the road with severe injuries to his face and head. An ambulance arrived. He was taken to Southampton Hospital, and from there taken by helicopter to Stony Brook University Hospital where he was treated and initially listed in serious condition. Today he is in stable condition, but will probably require reconstructive surgery.

So where does this leave us? The bus, rented from M and V Limousine in Commack, was signed for by an adult over the age of 18. There are issues that the bus might have had a defective window, and it is being gone over with a fine tooth comb, but the window seems to have done what it is supposed to do. On buses, there is a latch you pull up from underneath to get an exit window free, and then you push on it and it swings open. To close it, you push harder and it swings back closed. I suppose they'll have a good look at that latch.

And who is responsible for all this? The bus company? The guy who signed the rental? The parents? Everybody had to know what was going on - according to one kid, the bus driver even obligingly stopped at a smoke shop so the kids could buy cigarettes.

One adult I spoke to about this said, "Where were the parents in all this?"

Another adult told me that when they went out on a party bus in high school, years ago, the teens got the bus driver drunk. (What a brilliant thing to do.)

But 35 unsupervised high school seniors, mostly underage, with liquor, cigarettes and no chaperone on a big bus?

There don't seem to be any laws in effect to deal with something like this. There should be.

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