Marysville, NC — In mid-October, a school bus transporting students from Maysville Elementary School was involved in a wreck that left three students injured. The driver, Marsha Jarman, was later found to be at fault for the accident and was cited for reckless driving.
This happened on Monday morning, October 12, 2015 along Catfish Road/1105.
The police said that Jarman was driving the bus along Catfish Lake Road that morning and was near Highway 58 when it swerved off the road at about 45 mph and went into a ditch.
This was at about 7:30 a.m.
Of the five students aboard the bus, only three were taken to a New Bern hospital for treatment. None of the injuries were believed to be life-threatening.
Later, police said that though the roads were wet at the time from rain, they don’t think weather was a factor. Instead, they charged Marsha Jarman with reckless driving. It’s not clear whether she was kept on as a school bus driver after this.
Map of the Accident
Commentary:
Without sounding like I’m being overly hard on the bus driver, this is exactly the kind of accident that, as a parent, you don’t want to hear about. We’d like to think we can trust bus drivers to be responsible – and most of them are – but what do you do when one of them causes an accidents that leaves people hurt? Or worse, dead? There was a recent wreck involving a school bus in Houston, TX that rolled off a highway and killed 2 students.
Well, by default, the law doesn’t allow claims or lawsuits to be failed against governmental municipalities. This is generally referred to as sovereign immunity. However, the Federal Tort Claims Act and most states have made exceptions to this rule, and do allow lawsuits to be filed, but severely restrict them.
In most cases involving school buses, there is a shorter deadline to file a claim and there’s a limit on damages to be paid out by the school district if their driver was negligent in causing an accident. Usually, it’s a first-come-first-serve basis, meaning that whoever files the claim first gets the biggest bite of the apple.
I’m not familiar with Jones County’s rules on filing claims against school districts, but those are the general principles I’ve found to be true of most places.
— Grossman Law Offices
