An Arizona mother has been arrested for the vicious pummeling of a school bus driver earlier this month before her boyfriend grabbed her and pulled her away.
Hermenegilda Marquez, 27, is charged with aggravated assault on a school employee, KSAZ reported.
Court documents say the 64-year-old bus driver was a substitute who did not normally drive the route.
Blurred video provided by the police department shows Marquez entering the bus and yelling at the driver on April 11 before she bean slapping the victim repeatedly in teh head and face and then “closing her hands into fists and continuing to pummel the victim with both hands,” court documents say.
According to the video, Marquez forces her way onto the bus past children trying to exit and yells, “Are you talking s*** about my daughter?” She backs off the bus while more children exit, then two other parents appear in the doorway and complain that the driver has stopped at the wrong location.
Then Marquez pushes her way past those parents and yells again at the driver, who tells Marquez repeatedly to get off the bus while the attacker yells obscenities and hits her.
At one point, Marquez appears to grab the driver’s hair in an attempt to drag her off the bus.
The driver told investigators that she didn’t know Marquez or her daughter, AZFamily reported.
A man, identified as Marquez’s boyfriend, pulls her off the bus, court documents say, and they fled in a car before police arrived on scene. She was arrested last week, KSAZ said.
“The defendant was read her Miranda rights verbatim from a Mesa Police Department Miranda card, and she said she understood her rights,” detectives wrote in the court documents.” The defendant was asked if she knew why she was arrested, and she immediately invoked her right to counsel. The defendant was shown video of the attack on the bus and was told that because she was on video committing the assault, she would be charged with a felony, but she showed no emotion upon hearing this.”
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[Featured image: Mesa Police Department via AZFamily.com. Inset: Hermenegilda Marquez/Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office]
