A Michigan seventh grader pulled over to stop a school bus carrying about 66 students after the bus driver passed out while driving
Dillon Reeves, a Lois E. Carter Middle School student, stopped a bus on Wednesday after the bus driver lost consciousness.
A Michigan seventh grader performed an act of heroism after a bus driver passed out while driving.
The student, Dillon Reeves, sprang to work, stopped the car, and told people to call 911.
He said he knew what to do because he had seen the bus driver stop the bus before.
A seventh grader in Michigan, who had taken control of his school bus after the driver's death, told his parents he knew what must be done because he watched the driver do it daily.
District Administrator Robert Levernois said that the student was riding the bus back from Louis E. Carter Middle School in Warren, Michigan, on Wednesday when the bus driver became dizzy and lost consciousness.
Livernois wrote that the "quick-thinking" seventh grader—later identified as Dillon Reeves—"saw the driver in distress, got to the front of the bus, and helped stop it without incident."
At a news conference Thursday afternoon, Livernois said Reeves has "enough" to know not to hit the handbrake but to apply it slowly until the bus stops safely.
The boy's stepmother, Iretta Reeves, told reporters at the press conference that when she asked her son how exactly he knew how to stop the bus, he pointed to the bus driver, who watched him do it every day.
In the video, Dillon Reeves stops the bus and tells fellow students, "Somebody calls 911 right now!" Students' screams can be heard in the background.
And his father, Steve Reeves, added that it might help that his son doesn't have a cell phone, which makes him more attentive to his surroundings.
As soon as the bus stopped, Levernois said, two Good Samaritans — one walking nearby and a driver in another vehicle — stepped in to help the students off the bus' emergency exit before first responders arrived three to four minutes later to treat them—the driver.
None of the students were injured in the accident. The 40-year-old bus driver was taken to the hospital — and her condition is "stable but with precautions in place," Warren Fire Commissioner Skip McAdams told CNN.
Livernois estimated that the bus carried about 66 students and that Reeves' actions "made all the difference in this crisis."
"Dillon has been a great guy this year," his stepmother said at Thursday's news conference. "To do something like this fills my heart...it makes my heart pound. I'm so proud of it."
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