300-pound bus assistant choked, dragged, crushed special needs student, cops say
Video shows a 300-pound school bus driver assistant choking an 80-pound mentally disabled boy with cerebral palsy, Palm Beach County Schools officers say.
The details are on a probable cause affidavit for the arrest of Michael Tolliver, a 54-year-old now charged with three counts of child abuse and one count of aggravated child abuse. Tolliver posted $14,000 bond Thursday morning.
Though Tolliver was arrested Wednesday, the investigation began Feb. 14. Tolliver, according to the affidavit, works as an assistant on a bus that ferries special needs students to and from Rolling Green Elementary School in Boynton Beach. His job is to put children in their seat belts and help the bus driver maintain order.
Tolliver told PBCS investigators that he put a seat belt on a 10-year-old student who he and the bus driver said had previous discipline issues on the bus. The boy “was unusually unruly ... yelling loudly and beating the nearby bus window with his fists,” Tolliver said, before taking off his seat belt and swinging it around.
After the boy continued swinging the belt toward Tolliver and other students through Tolliver’s request to “calm down,” the aide said he told the bus driver to call Rolling Green’s principal, Allyson Manning. She ordered the child off the bus.
Tolliver “stated that he then, carefully, placed one of his hands on the shoulder of the student and another hand gently on the side of the student’s neck in an effort to stop his arms from swinging and help him to his feet,” the affidavit says.
Manning, described as “visibly shaken,” recalled a more violently coercive sequence of events after she told the boy to come with her off the bus.
With the boy standing in the aisle facing Manning with Tolliver behind him, she said, the bus aide “wrapped his hands around the neck of the victim from behind him. The suspect lifted the victim up from the ground by his neck, his feet leaving the floor as his body lifted. The principal yelled loudly, “Put him down! Put him down!”
Tolliver complied, removing his hands from the student’s neck and releasing him, according to the report.
Three days later, investigators looked at the video.
Their observation says it shows the 10-year-old hitting another student with the seat belt. Manning is called. While she’s talking to the 10-year-old, “he becomes unruly and begins bouncing in his seat. The suspect responds by pushing the child back down in his seat with an open hand to the victim’s face.”
And, 26 seconds later, investigators see the choking. They timed it at five seconds while Tolliver yells into the boy’s right ear, “Cut it out! I told you to cut it out.” Afterward, investigators noted the boy’s voice was altered.
The affidavit quotes a 2011 study by the National Training Institute that says manual strangulation “can result in serious injury and/or death in just five to 10 seconds.”
Investigators watched other video footage of Tolliver on the bus with the 10-year-old, according to the report.
Jan. 30: When Tolliver moves him from one seat to the other, the boy is “violently and forcibly jerked from a seated position by the arm and dragged to the seat behind him.”
Jan. 31: After the 10-year-old hits the bus driver and calls Tolliver “Fatty,” the six-foot, 300-pound Tolliver “uses his body to squeeze the child between him and the window of the bus, forcibly sitting in the same seat as the [boy] and moving his body in a manner that pins the child” against the side of the bus.
“The child visibly struggles to breathe and see beyond [Tolliver’s] body that is literally covering the child’s body from view. The child yells ‘You’re sitting on me!’ The suspect continues to use his body to pin the child against the bus wall as he admonishes other children for their behavior.”
Tolliver sat like that on the boy for almost three minutes.
Feb. 1: Investigators say Tolliver tells kids getting on the bus to “take their assigned seats or “Get off my bus.” He grabs the 10-year-old boy by a backpack strap and left wrist and walks him to his seat “by ... a forced escort.” He later moves the 10-year-old to another seat by “grabbing his right arm, lifting him from the seat by the wrist and into the next seat up, coarsely stating, ‘Sit there!’ “
Feb. 4: The 10-year-old and another boy “appear to be playing and having fun” when Tolliver tells the 10-year-old to stop hiding under the seat. Tolliver grabs the boy by the back of his neck and drags him to a seat across the aisle and three rows back by the neck.
The boy says, “You don’t have to grab me.”
Tolliver says “If you think you’re man enough to do something about it, you get up and do it. If not, you sit there and be quiet.”
Boy: “F----t.”
Tolliver: “All right, I’ll be all the [homosexual slur] you want me to be.”
Feb. 13: Investigators say Tolliver puts “his open hand on the victim’s head, steering him into his seat by his head.”
Investigators say they showed the videos from Feb. 1 and Feb. 13 to Christine Ferlita, the exceptional student education specialist who manages transportation for ESE students.
The affidavit says Ferlita wrote a sworn statement that starts with “per the videos I reviewed regarding the interactions between [the student] and Tolliver, I think Tolliver’s behavior abusive.”
Ferlita also says the student, though “intellectually disabled,” “is able to comprehend and follow through with simple, one-step directives, such as ‘go to your seat’ or ‘put your seat belt on.’ There is no just cause for the use of physical force against [the boy] based on the scope and sequence of Tolliver’s job duties as a bus attendant that presides over all special needs students on the route.”
This story was originally published April 7, 2019 at 2:19 PM.
