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The parents of a boy who died last year after a bus stop mix-up continue to look for answers.
By SARAH SCHWEITZER
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 28, 2000
TAMPA -- The numbers tumble out of his mouth.
The 15-inch-high grass. The 14-pound backpack. Six o'clock, when the Ritalin began draining from his son's body, leaving him hungry and unfocused. The 3.2 miles his son had walked and the 2 miles he had left to go. The 6:49 p.m. sunset, when darkness moved in, chilling his son's body in what would prove to be his final minutes alive.
"You go through all kinds of thoughts when you're trying to piece something like this together," David Martin says.
David Martin and his wife, Kim, have plenty of numbers but still no answers.
"I just can't imagine it," Kim Martin says. "How they could have let him off that bus." One year ago today, their 10-year-old son, Eric, was struck and killed by a passing car as he walked home along Lutz-Lake Fern Road after getting off at the wrong bus stop.
An internal school district investigation found that the bus driver was not to blame for the mix-up.
But the Martins lay fault squarely on the bus driver, and they have sued the school district for negligence. In their lawsuit, the Martins name the bus driver, the 18-year-old driver of the car that struck Eric and the driver's parents.
The Martins say they are not seeking retribution but want attention focused on the problem of lax school bus safety.
"We want the situation addressed so that problems like these come to an end," said David Martin.
Superintendent Earl Lennard would not comment on the lawsuit except to say through a spokeswoman, "We grieve for the tragedy as we would for the loss of any of our students."
The Martins lambast Lennard and others for what they describe as the district's indifference to their loss. School officials have communicated with them only sporadically. When Eric's yearbook was ready to be picked up last spring, they say, school administrators telephoned neighbors.
For the past year, Dave Martin, a computer consultant, has immersed himself in work.
"It's been an outlet for me," he said.
A back injury from years earlier has kept Kim Martin from doing the same. Her days have been spent at home, among the pictures of Eric that still dot shelves and walls. Some days, anxiety and depression overwhelm her. But on better days, she focuses her energy on calling elected representatives in an effort to draw attention to what she says are unenforced school bus safety rules.
"I didn't want to feel helpless," said Kim Martin, who trained to become a paramedic after watching one save her other son, Jeff, when he was choking as a baby.
But coping mechanisms, the Martins say, are merely that.
"People tell us, "It's going to get better,' " David Martin says. "But really, you just get to the point that you can handle it."
Both spend large chunks of every day mentally reconstructing the scene time and again, mingling officials' hard facts with their hearts' recollections of their younger son.
"He was a homebody. He loved to have someone petting on him," Kim Martin said. "He was the one who brought me iced tea when I was in a back brace and couldn't get up to get it myself."
Eric had a hyperactivity disorder, which was treated with Ritalin. He was a bright boy, the Martins say, racing through The Hobbit before his 10th birthday. But his hyperactivity made him lose focus, often about homework.
His grades at Walker Middle School were mediocre, which was why school officials had enrolled him in a special after-school program. Kim Martin had worried about the bus ride home, but she said school officials told her not to worry.
The morning of Oct. 28, Eric's first day of the special program, David Martin drove Eric to school as always, telling him to have fun while Eric rolled his eyes at the prospect.
Eric was supposed to have been dropped off that night at 6:20 p.m. at a bus stop a half-block from their house, Kim Martin said. When he didn't arrive, she called the district while David Martin headed to Walker Middle School.
Finding no one there, he drove around looking for the bus but had no luck and returned to school. He banged on a door until a janitor opened it.
"I thought he had fallen asleep in class, so I start looking under tables and desks," said David Martin.
Kim Martin, meanwhile, made frantic phone calls from home, explaining to school officials that Eric would not have dawdled.
"He knew when we got home we were going shopping for Rollerblades for his birthday," she said.
Shortly after 9 p.m., word came that a boy had been struck and killed in an auto accident at 7:25 p.m. Kim Martin remembers opening the door to investigators.
"They didn't have to say anything," she said.
David Martin was still at Walker Middle School when a sheriff's deputy offered him a ride home.
"You know, but you keep hope alive, . . . hope that it's not as bad as it seems," he said. "But of course it was."
Their world, the Martins say, has changed in every way. And yet everything else has stayed the same. The pool, which Eric loved, is still cleaned but no one has set so much as a toe into the water. His room, with bunk beds and pictures of aquatic animals, is as he left it.
Lutz-Lake Fern Road, the accident site, is still the major thoroughfare leading to their subdivision, but Kim Martin won't drive it.
They have transferred their older son, Jeff, to a private school. He is more comfortable there, they say, away from the memories of Walker Middle School. He has changed as well, becoming more serious, more cautious, they say.
"When he sees someone driving recklessly, he comments on it," Kim Martin said.
Today, the anniversary of Eric's death, will be a difficult one, the Martins say. But so will Monday, when Eric would have turned 12. And so will Halloween, Eric's favorite holiday.
"There is nothing anyone can do to prepare you for the pain that never goes away," David Martin said. "We are tortured by it all the time."