4-year-old reportedly abandoned inside locked school bus for almost 6 hours

MANSFIELD, Ohio – An Ohio mom wants a bus driver to face criminal charges after she says the driver abandoned her 4-year-old daughter inside of a locked school bus for almost six hours, Fox 8 reports.

Rita Adams says the bus driver and her assistant accidentally left her 4-year-old daughter Kizzy on a bus bound for the child's Mansfield preschool.

Adams tells Fox 8 Kizzy's father put her on the bus Tuesday morning, and her daughter fell asleep on her way to school.

Meanwhile, the bus began to have mechanical problems, so the driver decided to switch busses at the garage.

Fox 8 reports the bus driver and her assistant failed to notice the sleeping child, and left her inside the bus with the doors locked and the windows up.

Nearly six hours later, Adams says she called the school when Kizzy failed to return on the afternoon bus.

“She said, ‘Well, we have her down as absent.’ I said, ‘What do you mean absent? I put her on the bus this morning,’” Adams told Fox 8.

After a frantic search of the school, Kizzy was finally found inside the locked bus in the garage. Adams says her daughter was sweating and upset.

“This is an oversight that cannot be tolerated," a Mansfield City Schools spokesman told Fox 8 in an e-mail. "It is the responsibility of the bus driver and any adult aide on the bus to check every row to be sure all students have exited the bus.”

Adams says she wants the bus driver and her assistant to be charged with child endangerment. She says the situation could have been much worse.

“It was 60-degrees. Had it been even today, or the day before, she wouldn’t have been so lucky,” Adams told Fox 8.

Click for more on this story from Fox 8.