School bus driver kills 15-year-old crossing street in hit-and-run, New York cops say
A 15-year-old died crossing a city street after a school bus driver struck her and then rolled over her body with the vehicle while she was on the pavement in New York, police said.
The driver eventually turned himself in and was arrested after driving off in what police called a hit-and-run on Monday, Jan. 17, PIX 11 reported.
Aleksandr Patlakh, 55, is charged with “failure to yield to a pedestrian” and “failure to use due care” after the teen, Antonia Zatulovska, was killed that morning in Brooklyn, the New York City Police Department confirmed in a statement to McClatchy News.
“The weird thing was he slowed down after he hit her, which is kind of shaky,” witness Michael Aryeh told PIX 11. “Either way he should have come out to see if anything happened. But he didn’t.”
Surveillance footage shows how the bus made a turn, hit Zatulovska and then rolled over her, according to the New York Post.
When police got to the scene, they found the girl “with trauma to the head, lying on the ground unconscious and unresponsive,” they said. EMS “pronounced (her) deceased.”
“This poor little girl. She was just a small, small human,” another witness told CBS New York. “And the bus driver probably just didn’t realize that he unfortunately took someone’s life with the way he was driving.”
Multiple witnesses told the outlet that the school bus was carrying children when it struck the teen.
Patlakh told authorities he didn’t know his bus had hit the girl and killed her, according to CBS New York.
