EMERSON, Ga. — Dashcam video released Friday afternoon by the Emerson Police Department shows an officer on Monday pulling over a Bartow County school bus - and arresting the driver on charges of DUI-drugs and reckless driving.
The driver, Sharon Fisher, who has been driving for Bartow County schools since 2015, was on her way to pick up children at an elementary school to take them home. There were no children on the bus.
The video shows the officer stopping the bus, then getting into it, and his microphone picks up the audio of him telling Fisher that he saw her driving erratically, off and on the road.
“You all right?” he asks.
“Yeah, I had trouble with my bus…”
Witnesses drive up to the traffic stop and, just out of camera range, tell officers they were afraid that the driver was going to kill someone.
“She just kept going off the road, then she almost hit somebody head-on,” one of the witnesses said.
An officer escorts Fisher off of the bus, and she again tells the officer, at length, that something was wrong with her bus, but not with her.
“My bus wasn’t working,” she says, “and so I went to the bus barn and picked it up this morning after my [morning] route, then I parked it by my house, so I drove from my house, I was going up here, all my stuff shut down. It wasn’t working. So, I was messing with stuff, trying to see if it works. And so when I came up on [Highway] 41, I was going to turn it off, to go up to my elementary school [Allatoona Elementary School], but then I thought if my bus isn’t working, I’m gonna turn right, and park at Emerson Elementary, ‘cause that’s where I park my bus…”
OFFICER: “Are you on any type of medication or anything like that?
FISHER: “I’m not.”
OFFICER: “Is there any reason why you’re slightly slurring your speech just now?”
FISHER: “I’m nervous.”
Fisher agrees to take a field sobriety test, and later she tells 11Alive News that she did not do well on that test. The dashcam video shows her wobbling, trying to walk a straight line. She has trouble standing on one foot. And she again said it was because she was nervous, not because she was on any drugs.
“The doctor prescribed some muscle relaxers,” she tells the officer, “but I don’t think I took one this morning.”
OFFICER: “I don’t believe you’re under the influence of alcohol, ma’am.”
FISHER: “I’m not.”
OFFICER: “I believe you’re under the influence of...a depressant. But I don’t believe you’re under the influence of alcohol.”
Fisher submitted to a blood test and was later released from jail on bond. She is on leave from the school system because of her arrest.
11Alive News talked with her and her husband Friday evening at their home in Cartersville. She declined to speak on camera but said she has no doubt that the blood test will come back negative. She is confident the charges will be dropped and hopes to drive a school bus again.