As if the smell of pee on MARTA weren't enough.
A MARTA employee is in jail on pending charges of kidnapping a 15-year-old girl on a bus. Labels: crime drama, local news, raep
When Jamella Duvall saw a MARTA bus approach her stop on Hollywood Road Dec. 21, she said, it pulled over and let her on like dozens of times before.
She said she had no idea her step onto the bus would lead to a flying leap from the moving vehicle.
Dennis Sims, 48, a bus inspector, was supposed to be transporting the bus from a garage to the H.E. Holmes MARTA station for a bus swap, according to the MARTA police report. He had no authority to pick up passengers.
Sims told police that when he picked up Duvall he told her that the bus was out of service but he was going to the Holmes station and would take her.
Duvall says he never said that. In either case, said MARTA spokeswoman Cara Hodgson, he was "in clear violation" of MARTA policy and "under no circumstances" should have picked up a passenger.
On the bus, the first odd thing Duvall noticed, she said, is that Sims was wearing street clothes. She pulled out her Breeze Card and he said not to worry about the fare. Then, according to the girl's account, he passed stops where people were waiting.
Duvall said she asked why, and Sims said he couldn't pick up everybody. She asked him to stop the bus. He did not answer and instead, the bus sped up, she said. She asked again. And again. Then she looked at him.
He turned around, smiling at her, licking his lips, she said. "He was looking at me like, 'I got some meat,'" she said in an interview Friday.
He is described in police records as six foot four and 230 pounds.
"I started crying," demanding to be let off the bus, Duvall said.
She went to the rear entrance on the side of the moving bus, kicked the door off its hinges and jumped, she said, hitting her head on the sidewalk as she landed.
She said the driver stopped, got out and ran after her. A shopkeeper on Hollywood Road kept him away from her, she said.
"I felt like I had been saved," Duvall said. "He can't get to me no more."
Duvall was taken to the Grady Memorial Hospital, treated and released with stitches on her face, road rash on her hands and knees and headaches that continue to bother her, she said. She intends to sue MARTA for negligence, said her lawyer, Joseph Weeks.
Sims is in the Fulton County Jail, according to jail records, charged with criminal trespass, false imprisonment and kidnapping. The lawyer assigned to him at the Fulton County Public Defender's office did not respond to a phone message.
Hodgson said MARTA conducts criminal background checks on all prospective employees. She said he has no similar incidents on his record. He had worked for the agency 22 years.
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