Jamestown, NY — November 17, 2025, a child was killed in a bus accident at about 8:10 a.m. near the 300 block of Cole Avenue.

Authorities said a child was hit by a Panama Central School District bus at Milton J. Fletcher Elementary School.

The child, a 4-year-old girl, died after being taken to a local hospital, according to authorities.

No other injuries were reported.

The bus had only one student on it, along with the driver, authorities said.

Authorities have not released any additional information about the Chautauqua County crash at this time.

Commentary by Attorney Michael Grossman

When people read about a school bus fatally striking a child outside an elementary school, they’re likely to ask the same thing I did: How could something like this possibly happen? Was the child in the bus's blind spot? Was the driver distracted or in motion when they shouldn’t have been? We don’t have those answers yet, but they’re the kinds of questions any serious investigation needs to address.

At this point, it’s been reported that the bus belonged to Panama Central School District and that it struck a 4-year-old girl near the school around 8:10 a.m. Authorities haven’t said whether the child was boarding, exiting or even intended to interact with the bus at all. That matters, because depending on what exactly was happening at the time of impact, different accountability questions come into play.

We also don’t know whether the bus was parked or moving, or if school personnel were present to supervise. In cases I’ve handled where young children were injured around school buses, it often turned out that lax procedures or blind spots in supervision played just as big a role as the driver’s own conduct.

A proper investigation should start by recovering camera footage, both from the bus and from the school’s property. These days, many school buses are equipped with external and internal cameras. If those were running, they can help reconstruct exactly where the child was and what the driver could see. Driver background checks, route training and even logs showing whether the driver was running early or late can also shed light on whether this was a one-time mistake or the result of broader systemic issues.

That’s especially important when very young children are involved. A 4-year-old isn’t equipped to spot traffic dangers or predict a bus’s movements. That’s why procedures around school transportation, especially hand-offs between caregivers and drivers, are supposed to have layers of protection. If those layers failed, we need to know why.

There’s a tendency in these cases to look at the outcome and immediately blame the driver. That may turn out to be justified. But in my experience, the driver is often just the last link in a longer chain of bad decisions: decisions about policies, training and oversight that set the stage for something like this.

The only way to know what truly happened is to pull the thread of evidence until the full picture comes into view.

Key Takeaways:

• It’s unclear whether the child was boarding, exiting, or near the bus for another reason when she was struck.
• Footage from school and bus cameras may help show what the driver could or should have seen.
• Proper investigations should look beyond the driver’s actions and examine supervision, procedures and transportation policies.
• Very young children require extra precautions around buses. Any failure in those safeguards needs close scrutiny.
• Determining accountability requires gathering and analyzing all available evidence, not jumping to conclusions.