An 81-year-old man was left alone in a public transport vehicle for 7 and a half hours, which resulted in him falling and breaking his teeth. His daughter, who eventually rescued him, said she was puzzled by the cause of the accident and had a series of questions in her mind.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Kristen Giles, a resident of Nova Scotia, said that on June 11, her father Donald McKeen (pictured above) visited her home in Oakfield. As usual, he used the community bus service provided by East Hants Community Rider to go to her home every Wednesday.
After visiting his daughter that day, the driver came to pick him up at about 3pm to take him back to the long-term care home about 8 kilometres away. Giles thought everything was going well, but at 10:30 p.m., he received a call from the nursing home staff saying that McKean was nowhere to be seen. Giles was very nervous and then drove with her husband to look for her father. They found the bus in the bus parking lot, but it seemed that no one was in the car.
Giles turned on the light of his cell phone and shone it through the car window, and suddenly saw his father’s wheelchair, but there was no one in the seat. They broke the window with a rock and found McKean lying on the floor of the car. She saw her father unbuckle his seatbelt and apparently try to leave, but he fell to the ground and was unable to open the door and leave. His legs could not move properly, and his arms did not have enough strength to support his body.
Giles said: “The temperature reached 26 degrees that day, and he was trapped in the sealed compartment for 7 and a half hours. After I found him, I said to him: ‘Dad, you are safe! It’s okay, we are here.’ He said: ‘He (the driver) left me here, he just left me like this.'”
Paramedics arrived and took McKean to the hospital. Giles said his father was dehydrated, had broken teeth, and his body was bruised from lying on the floor of the car for a long time. One of the East Hants Community Rider fleet’s community buses McKean has now been released from the hospital and is back in a nursing home. Giles said his father’s health has deteriorated.
RCMP confirmed a 64-year-old man has been charged with negligence causing bodily harm and failure to provide necessary care. Giles said the driver had given his father a ride many times before.
“The driver had always been very nice to my dad and I really believe this was an honest mistake. I don’t think he did it on purpose, but it happened.” She said her father was the only passenger on the bus at the time and she didn’t understand why the driver forgot to drop him off, and she also wanted to know why the nursing home didn’t notice he hadn’t returned for so long.
“I felt like something was wrong on so many levels.”” He wasn’t there for dinner, he wasn’t there for his medication in the evening, but they didn’t call,” Giles said. She said her father also needed help with bedtime.
The organization that provides the community bus service issued a statement on its official website saying that it is conducting an internal investigation into the incident and will not provide more details for the time being out of respect for personal privacy and investigation work. The nursing home and its affiliated organization have not yet responded.