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Bus driver heeded nature's call, mid-route, passenger says

E-mail|Link|Comments () June 8, 2009 05:30 PM

By Noah Bierman, Globe Staff

This was not quite the pit stop everyone on Bus Number 8 had in mind this afternoon. The driver, it seems, had some personal business to settle.

“He pulls over on the side of the road -- and it was not a bus stop,” said Debbie Thornton, director of nursing for Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program, who said she was a passenger. “And everybody in the bus was like ‘What the heck? Why are we stopping?’ And then, ‘Why is the bus driver getting off the bus?’ ”

Thornton said she followed the driver with her eyes and grew more surprised.

“I could not see him from the waist down, but the body language that I witnessed, it’s unmistakable when a guy’s peeing – on the side of the road,” she said.

Thornton, a Dorchester woman who has taken the Number 8 bus since July, said the episode occurred near South Bay Shopping Center in front of an NSTAR building just before 4 p.m. She called MBTA customer service to complain, she said.

MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said the driver was interviewed by a supervisor after his shift and "he did not deny it."

Pesaturo said the 37-year-old driver, who has been on the job 9 years, will face discipline, the severity of which will depend on whether he has had any previous infractions.

Pesaturo said managers could recall one similar incident, in 2006, in which another driver was disciplined for a similar act.

Thornton said she would have been more understanding had the driver pulled into Stop & Shop, “if he was that desperate.”