Student pummels bus driver

The driver may call it quits. The Meadowlawn Middle School student faces a felony charge.

ST. PETERSBURG - The school bus idled on Sixth Avenue N for 20 minutes, unable to pass two parked cars.

"You don't know how to drive," taunted a 13-year-old boy in the back. "I can drive better than you. Let's get going."

When one of the cars moved, Stanley Cardonick hit the gas, speeding to make up time. Minutes later, a motorcycle cop pulled him over for doing 51 in a 35 mph zone.

"They got you, ha ha ha," the boy wailed, according to Cardonick. So rowdy was the scene Tuesday morning, the officer asked Cardonick to step outside, where he wrote a $179 ticket. Kids laughed and pointed.

It was already a bad day for Cardonick. But the biggest blow was yet to come.

As the Meadowlawn Middle School students spilled off the bus, police said, the boy punched Cardonick in the face, knocking him out the front door.

"He cold-cocked me," said Cardonick, 75. "I never saw it coming."

He says he got punched once, though police say it was several punches.

Cardonick has a broken nose and stitches under his left eye and where a tooth punctured his lip. The fall left cuts and bruises on his shoulder, arms, knee and back.

"I don't even recognize myself in the mirror," Cardonick said. "My wife says I look like an alien."

His doctor said he cannot work for three months. But that may be too soon for Cardonick, who's mulling whether to come back at all.

"This has got to be one of the worst jobs ever," he said. "People don't understand what we go through."

The boy, who is 5 foot 5 inches tall and weighs 130 pounds, was arrested by police on a felony charge of aggravated battery. He was being held at the county Juvenile Assessment Center on Wednesday. He also faces school discipline, perhaps even expulsion.

The St. Petersburg Times is not identifying him because of his age.

School district spokesman Ron Stone said if not the only case of its kind, the attack was certainly rare.

"I'm totally upset," said the boy's mother, Pamela Williams. "I didn't teach my boy to act like that. He'll have to suffer the consequences."

A retired cologne salesman from Pennsylvania, Cardonick said he took up bus driving in 2002 on the advice of a friend, also a driver. Cardonick, who Stone said has a clean personnel record, said the $11.35-an-hour pay is considerably more than he could earn at a supermarket.

Of course there's a tradeoff. School bus drivers say their jobs are profoundly stressful and often thankless.

As Cardonick tells it, the 13-year-old has been a menace on the bus, an "instigator." He complained twice to school officials about the student, most recently a few weeks ago when, he said, the youth threatened to knock him out.

"I would have written him up again this time, but I didn't have a chance," Cardonick said.

He said he will take some time to decide whether he'll return to the job. His wife, however, still plans to go through bus driver training later this month.

"I can't go by what one student did," Annie Cardonick said. "The kids have to get to school somehow, and they're crying for bus drivers."

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