It’s Friday, Sept. 6; the end of a long week. Kionni Davis steps onto his bus outside of Kammerer Middle School and sits down near the front. He has an idea of what’s coming; he’s already called his mother and told her that he is “about to be jumped.”
A video posted to Facebook shows Kionni Davis trying to protect himself from another student. He is hunched over in a bus seat, his hands curled around his head. The student repeatedly punches and kicks Kionni Davis, even beats him with a belt. In the background of the video, the other students on the bus cheer the violence on.
“There were some back and forth comments, and he eventually just got up and started beating me,” Kionni Davis said.
“He still has a shoe print mark on the back of his neck and marks behind his ear,” Whitney Davis, Kionni Davis’s mother, said. When Kionni Davis returned home, his eyes were black and blue, and the second day after the attack, they were swollen almost completely shut.
These scenes are disturbing enough—but in the background, the bus driver, Lillian Dixon, remains silent.
“I was in traffic, I was looking for somewhere to pull over so I could check on your baby, so I could get your baby back to school to be safe,” Dixon later said, in a Facebook Live Video posted on Sept. 13.
“Drivers are required to pull over in a safe location and contact the compound to report the fight and the compound will call the police, if needed,” JCPS Spokesperson Carolyn Callahan said. “Drivers are not required to get in the middle of the fight. They have the right to protect themselves by stepping back, never forward.”
According to the JCPS Student Support and Behavior Intervention Handbook, the consequences for students who misbehave onboard their bus include the suspension of bus privileges, the possibility of in-school consequences, and suspension from school.
An investigation by WAVE Troubleshooters in Sept. 2023 revealed that during the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years, a total of 6,165 referrals for striking another student or staff member on a bus were written, but only 2,034 resulted in a suspension.
After the incident, two youth-based organizations, Hip Hop N 2 Learning and The Real Young Prodigies threw Kionni Davis a party to celebrate his thirteenth birthday.
At the party, there were many news organizations reporting on the incident. “I wanted to make [The Davis family] feel welcome and comfortable without having to worry about cameras in their faces,” Love Eden (12, YPAS) said.
Eden is a member of The Real Young Prodigies, and was at Kionni Davis’s party. Both Whitney Davis and Eden spoke about bullying and the effects it can have on a person. But after the interview, it was time to celebrate.
“We sang, we talked, and we had a great time,” Eden said. “I found out that Kionni is a big fan of artists like Necrophagist and that we have the best sense of humor.”
Dixon has since chosen to resign from her job as a JCPS bus driver. She drove for JCPS for two years, and the district gave her the option to be fired or resign.
Whitney Davis says that her son will never return to Kammerer or another JCPS school.
“I taught him to turn the other cheek,” she said. “I taught him to ignore bullying. I had no idea that he would ever go through something like this.”
