WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A Palm Beach County father is waiting on answers after he said a bus driver left his son in a park 5 miles from his bus stop.
"He was scared. He didn't know where he was. Anything could've happened to him here. What's the cut-off on their liability?" David Mancuso, the father of 15-year-old Anthony Mancuso, said.
Anthony is a 10th-grade student at Suncoast High School in Riviera Beach and said he fell asleep on his way home from school, missing his bus stop at Upland Way and Drexel Road west of West Palm Beach.
"Did they give you any alternatives? Did they offer you a safer place to go?" WPTV reporter Joel Lopez asked.
"No, they just said, 'Call your parents for them to pick you up.' This is the only spot they gave me," Anthony Mancuso said.
He said he was left at Lake Lytal Park in West Palm Beach.
"I just fell asleep, woke up, next thing you know, I'm here," Anthony Mancuso said from the location.
Anthony said that the bus driver is his regular bus driver and he hasn't had any issues with him before.
After he got off the bus, he said that he didn't know where he was and his phone was almost dead, but his parents were able to track him down through GPS, although it took them 40 minutes to get there.
"We see on the news all the time whether kids are getting killed or abducted or something happens to them," David Mancuso said. "They should've never been put in that position."
He said he's spoken to the school district and school police as he's prepared to take legal action.
"That bus driver should not be driving, period," David Mancuso said. "Whether it's better training, better bus drivers, you have to pay bus drivers more to get better ones, I don't care what the answer is."
In July, WPTV's Stephanie Susskind reported that the school district transports more than 50,000 students on buses each day across 475 routes in Palm Beach County.
WPTV contacted the school district for answers and was told that the matter was under investigation.
"He's safe now, but how do we prevent this from happening to another kid?" David Mancuso asked.
