GBI declines request to investigate two Muscogee school district incidents

District Attorney Julia Slater has asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to launch probes into two incidents involving the Muscogee County School District, but the state agency has declined because Columbus police still are investigating those matters, a GBI spokesman confirmed Monday.

One case is the alleged body-slamming of a 13-year-old whose right leg later was amputated at the knee; the other is a fatal school bus crash that killed the driver and injured seven elementary school students.

The injured seventh-grader was Montravious Thomas, hospitalized Sept. 12 after behavioral specialist Bryant Mosley allegedly body-slammed Thomas three times at the Edgewood Student Services Center.

Mosley was employed by Mentoring and Behavioral Services, which had a contract with the school district. Thomas was a student at East Columbus Magnet Academy who was in the AIM program at the Edgewood center. That program is for students who violate district conduct codes.

The school bus crash that killed 67-year-old Roy Newman occurred at 7:44 a.m. Aug. 22 on Garrett Road, where the bus carrying Mathews Elementary School students ran off the two-lane street and crashed into a tree.

“The GBI has received a request letter from the DA's office to investigate an incident involving Thomas,” Nelly Miles, director of the bureau’s Office of Public Affairs, wrote in an email to the Ledger-Enquirer. “Due to the active investigation being conducted by the Columbus Police Department, the GBI is not conducting a separate investigation at this time.”

Miles repeated that last line in regard to the bus crash: “Additionally, the GBI has received a request letter from the DA’s office to investigate an incident involving a school bus crash.” Police continue to investigate that, too, he wrote.

Threatened with a $5 million lawsuit, the school district has released little information on the Thomas case.

“It has been on advice of legal counsel that MCSD has refrained from commenting on threatened litigation beyond the information provided by MCSD’s Communications office,” district communications director Valerie Fuller wrote in a September email. “The bulk of the relevant facts involving Montravious and his history in the district are educational records that MCSD cannot publicly discuss or release pursuant to federal law.”

Six of the seven elementary school students taken to the hospital after the bus crash were treated and released, but a seventh was airlifted to a hospital in Atlanta.

An Aug. 24 autopsy showed the driver died of “blunt-force trauma,” according to Coroner Buddy Bryan.

A witness reported the bus was traveling so erratically before the crash that it ran over a roadside mailbox and kept going. The mailbox owner happened to be driving south on Garrett Road that morning and reported the northbound bus crossed the center line into her lane and ran her off the road, nearly causing a head-on collision.

The bus then left the road and crashed a short distance away. A third witness traveling behind it said its brake lights never came on.

A police report said the bus first ran off the road’s right side for 187 feet and then ran off the road’s left side for 202 feet. It hit a second mailbox and a chain-link fence before smashing into the tree.

Newman, who’d driven full-time for the district since March 2014, was running late that morning because his regular bus broke down and he had to drive a replacement.

This story was originally published December 12, 2016 at 6:09 PM with the headline "GBI declines request to investigate two Muscogee school district incidents."