Video shows delayed bus stopped at 7-Eleven
New video has surfaced of several small children from a delayed school bus.
The children were missing nearly four hours on Thursday, and the new images raise more questions about where the bus driver took them.
Panicked parents from KIPP Destiny Elementary School in the Red Bird area called police and FOX 4 when the bus didn't drop off their children Thursday.
There is still a critical three-and-a-half-hour time period parents in which parents say no one has accounted for their children.
The new surveillance tape shows about 20 young children walking into a 7-Eleven at Buckner and Elam roads in southeast Dallas at about 6:09 p.m.
Parents say that’s information that they weren’t told.
The driver walks some kids in, while the rest ran across a busy parking lot on their own.
“What if he would have left one of those kids?” said parent Moniqua Hoskin.
The bus finally showed up at an east Oak Cliff school.
FOX 4 asked KIPP Destiny Elementary School and school bus operator company Durham School Services for answers.
What FOX 4 got instead were apologies.
Durham blamed a new driver and mechanical problems with the bus.
“Yesterday we had a new bus driver on the route which caused delays as well as a mechanical issue. The driver has been removed from the route and the bus is undergoing repair,” Durham School Services said in a statement.
In a statement, KIPP promised to put school staffers on buses and make sure the driver is removed from that route.
But as of late Friday evening, no one from Durham or KIPP could explain why the bus stopped at the 7-Eleven in Pleasant Grove -- miles away from where the bus was supposed to drop kids off -- in southeast Oak Cliff.
“There is no explanation for what happened yesterday – like, none,” said parent Diana Brown. “Four hours with kids on a bus, you couldn't call no one?”
On Friday, Durham buses continued to pick up kids outside KIPP Destiny.
The school says it couldn't comment on whether it would continue to contract with the bus service.
“Last night, [my daughter] told me, she said, ‘Mom, you know what?’” said Brown. “I was like, ‘What?’ She was like, ‘I was afraid I wasn't ever going to see you again.’ And I was like, ‘Why you say that?’ And she said ‘Because we was gone for so long and I didn't know where we was.’ And I was like, ‘You were going to see me again; I was going to find you.’”
The school said it tried to call parents and that GPS trackers on the bus helped notify them to tell parents there was a problem.
Parents who FOX 4 talked to directly counter that.
In fact, the school principal told FOX 4 on Thursday night that she didn’t have a clue anything was wrong until a couple of parents who happened to have her personal number reached her.
On Friday night, Durham School Services released a statement regarding the 7-Eleven stop that said,
“Neither Durham nor the school district were aware of the driver making this stop. We are continuing to investigate the full chain of events; the driver will no longer be performing route duties for KIPP.”