GBI: Let police do their job first
Two tragic incidents involving the Muscogee County School District have everybody demanding answers, and rightly so. We presume we’ll have them. But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said Monday that there is no cause for the state to be part of the investigation while the Columbus Police Department is still looking into the cases.
The first of those cases is the August school bus accident that claimed the life of driver Roy Newman and injured seven Mathews Elementary School students, one of whom had to be airlifted to Atlanta.
The other is the September incident in which a privately contracted behavioral specialist at Edgewood Student Services Center allegedly body-slammed a student in a disciplinary program; the student’s right leg was later amputated.
The circumstances of both incidents — the ones we know, anyway — raise lots of questions, few of which have yet been publicly answered. In the case of the student who lost his leg, the MCSD is facing a $5 million lawsuit filed by the boy’s family and has refused all further public comment — both on advice of counsel, and because “the bulk of the relevant facts” involve confidential records about the student that are protected by federal law, according to the school district’s public information office.
As for the bus crash, the basic forensic facts are public knowledge, but not the details. The driver died of blunt-force trauma, which also no doubt accounted for most if not all of the students’ injuries when the bus left the road and crashed into a tree.
But reports of the vehicle’s erratic path prior to the crash raise far more questions than those basic facts answer. The bus reportedly ran over a mailbox, crossed the center line and ran an oncoming car off the road, then hit another mailbox and a chain-link fence. A driver behind the bus said its brake lights never flashed.
The sooner we all know some relevant answers, the less time skepticism will have to fester.
Job well done, again
Carmen Cavezza has completed his latest mission, and as usual it has been a successful one. The former Army lieutenant general and Fort Benning commander is retiring as chairman and CEO of the National Infantry Museum Foundation.
Under his leadership, the foundation’s debt was reduced from $13 million to $5 million in only five years, and achieved the distinction of being voted the nation’s Best Free Museum in the USA Today 2016 Reader’s Choice Awards.
Cavezza’s long career of service, to both country and community, is familiar to most people here: He served 33 years in the Army, and after his term as commanding general at Fort Benning, he directed the Columbus events of the 1996 Olympics, then served as Columbus city manager. He later led the Cunningham Center at Columbus State University as its executive director.
He’ll stay on at the Foundation, to be led now by retired Lt. Gen. Tom Metz: “They’ll have a hard time getting rid of me,” Cavezza said. As if they’d want to.
This story was originally published December 13, 2016 at 2:08 PM with the headline "GBI: Let police do their job first."