A former bus matron took the stand in a Brooklyn courtroom yesterday and insisted that she did not taunt a severely autistic boy who repeatedly bashed his head against her school bus.
Connie Clark testified that she was suffering from a migraine headache during the Sept. 30, 2005, outburst by PJ Rossi, 7, who screamed and repeatedly head-butted a bus window and bench while she commanded, “Shut up, knock it off!”
Rossi’s mother caught Clark deriding her son on a tape recorder hidden inside his backpack.
A lawyer for the boy’s parents played a snippet of the recording in court. In it, Clark can be heard calling PJ a “knucklehead” during the shrieking boy’s ride to a Brooklyn school.
“It just slipped out,” Clark said in court.
The widow also challenged what the family’s lawyer, Thomas McManus, said was a recording of her griping, “We got a crazy kid here.”
“I thought I said ‘cranky,’ ” Clark, 54, said.
The fallout from the Staten Island-to-Brooklyn bus ride cost Clark her job, and last year, she took a misdemeanor plea to endangering the welfare of a child.
It also led to the Brooklyn Supreme Court lawsuit filed against the Department of Education and Atlantic Express bus company by Paul and Lisa Rossi, who contend the parties share the blame for a slowdown in the development of their now- 14-year-old son in the wake of the bus ride.
Clark and bus driver Robert Fischetti said PJ’s tantrums that month were far worse than they had been during the previous school year.
“He’d jerk his neck, smacking himself in the face,” Fischetti testified.
“I said, ‘Connie, I have no idea what happened to this baby.’ ”
Clark testified as a witness at the civil trial yesterday that she tried to calm PJ with a pillow given to her by his mom, and added that the boy resisted when she tried to put oven mitts on his hands so that he wouldn’t smack himself.
“I put them on and he threw them off,” she testified.
Clark said her training and skills were no match for PJ.
“The child needed a paraprofessional,” she said.