A crying baby can be stressful. A crying baby plus an angry stranger demanding that the baby stops crying can be torturous. Such was the case of the Oregon mum who was booted off a public bus in suburban Portland because she couldn’t get her baby to stop crying.
The bus driver, who is reportedly a mother herself, got on the loudspeaker and told the woman that she needed to make her baby stop crying, saying “I can’t drive with that noise.” Jennifer Chapman, 31, who witnessed the whole appalling ordeal, said that the baby wasn’t even crying that loudly.
“The mum wasn’t sitting there indifferent. She was fussing. She was doing something,” said Chapman who has a 21-month-old of her own.
However, when the baby didn’t stop, the driver stopped the bus and went to the back of the bus to confront the mother, who reportedly spoke very little English. The mother, apparently embarrassed at the fuss she was causing and understanding little of what was being said, got off the bus with the baby.
Chapman said she told the driver: “You can’t just kick a woman off the bus because her baby’s crying.”
To which the driver replied, “If you don’t like it, you can get off the bus.”
In a show of solidarity with her fellow mums, Chapman did. In fact, everyone got off the bus — not one passenger could tolerate how the driver treated the mum and her baby.
The plot thickens
Passengers have filed complaints with TriMet, the local public transportation authority, and the incident is currently under investigation. They had issued an official statement stating they had put the bus driver on paid leave, pending investigation. TriMet emphasized that it is not the district’s policy to eject crying children or anyone else from “vulnerable” populations.
In the mean time, the story of the poor mother who was booted off the bus and of the good people who stood by her side had gone viral in global newswires prompting many angry tales of prejudice towards parents with young children in public . Parents have written in, relating their own tales of trying to haul strollers onto buses already lurching away from the curb. The mother’s non-English-speaking status has been picked apart.
Fellow drivers have alternately accused the dispatcher of having “an attitude problem” and the driver of failing to simply “tune out” the offending din. After navigating in traffic and dealing with rude passengers all day long, the possibly stressed out bus driver simply took it out on the wrong person and at the wrong time.
Fact is, what the bus driver did was terrible, but understandable.
Would you agree or disagree with the bus driver’s actions? Have you experienced a similar scenario? Write in and tell us your crying baby horror story.
Source:
Rider says TriMet bus driver bounced mom and crying baby
Bus driver kicks off woman with crying baby; passengers leave too
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