Family of boy killed in bus crash urge community to remove ‘hate’ from city council meetings
After several emotional and charged city meetings, a Clark County family has asked for community members to change the conversation around the death of their son and remove what the family has called ‘hate’ from council meetings.
The statement was penned by the family of Aiden Clark, the Clark County boy killed on his way to school after a crash between an SUV and the Northwestern school bus he was riding in. In the days after his death, dozens of community members have raised concerns inside Springfield city commission chambers worried about members of the city’s Haitian community driving possibly without a valid driver’s license.
The man charged in his death, Hermanio Joseph, is a man of Haitian descent and did not have a valid driver’s license when the crash happened, investigators have indicated in court records.
Clark’s family told Springfield Assistant Mayor Rob Rue they felt the recent conversations were full of hate and not something the boy would have stood for.
“They wanted to – they asked if I could just stop it and I said, ‘no.’ And I actually asked them, I said ‘If you want to make a statement, I’d be willing to read it,’” Rue said, as shown on News Center 7 at 5 p.m.
That’s exactly what Rue did at Tuesday’s meeting. He said it was “intentional” that he read it publicly as the last word of the meeting.
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“Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same. Thank you to the community for your continued support,” the letter read in part.
Bedell took the letter written by Nathan and Danielle Clark to the Springfield Chapter of the NAACP Thursday. There, President Denise Williams said it was “needed.”
“Hopefully this work will not just calm it down, but just eliminate the chatter, eliminate the chatter. The family can’t mourn in peace with all of this hatred that has been shown in our community,” Williams said.
The case against Joseph is moving toward trial. He’s scheduled to be in court at the end of the month.
