A mum has described the moment she blocked a bus to rescue her daughter, who was suffering an epileptic fit, saying it was 'like something out of Starsky and Hutch'.
Olivia Harrison, 12, was travelling home from school with a friend on a bus in her hometown of Liverpool when she began acting strangely.
She stopped speaking to her friend and sat rigid in her seat, staring ahead.
Olivia's mum, Nicky, was waiting in the car to pick her up, but her daughter's classmate got off the bus alone. Nicky, who also suffers from epilepsy, immediately suspected that something might be wrong, and set off after the bus in her car.
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While she was following the vehicle, her mobile phone rang. A concerned passenger on the bus had taken Olivia's phone and used it to ring her mum to tell her that the Year 8 pupil appeared to be having a seizure.
However, despite passengers alerting him to the situation, Nicky says she was told by the good samaritan that the driver was refusing to pull over.
"She told me Olivia had been sick and said it was frightening because she was just staring into space," Nicky told the Liverpool Echo. "I could hear her saying 'her mother's behind us, will you just stop', but he still refused to stop."
Her maternal instincts kicked into overdrive as she caught up with the bus and made a decision to do whatever was necessary to get her daughter to safety:
"It was like something from Starsky and Hutch, I pulled alongside it and slammed on and just left my car in the middle of the road."
Once Nicky made it onto the bus, Olivia was so rigid and unresponsive that it took help from two passengers to get her out.
Olivia was taken to Alder Hey hospital, where she remained overnight while doctors ran tests to pinpoint the cause of the seizure.
"Even now it upsets me to think about where she could have ended up," Nicky said.
When she went down to speak to the bus company, Nicky claims she was told that the driver had been suspended while they investigated the allegation, but a spokesman Arriva said he could not confirm this.
Describing the investigation as 'full and urgent', the spokesman said: "We would like to offer our sincere apologies for any distress caused to the child and her family."
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