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By Minyvonne Burke
What was supposed to be a short commute from a California aquarium to a haunted ship for a Halloween party turned into a nightmare when the bus driver made a detour and then refused to go back. Stop, said a passenger.
Passenger Lee Piatelli told passenger Lee Piatelli that several passengers on board the bus were so scared that they called 911 and went out the window because they thought the driver was trying to to kidnap them.
Piatelli was on the shuttle Thursday night with his girlfriend, cousin and cousin's boyfriend heading for Queen Mary's Dark Harbor. He added that they had been ordered to park at the Pacific Aquarium in Long Beach and that a shuttle would take them with at least 20 other people to Dark Harbor.
The trip usually lasts 10 minutes, but Piatelli said that he quickly realized that something was wrong by looking at a map on his phone and seeing that the shuttle was leaving in the direction opposite.
The passengers then began to beg the driver to park, but he refused, telling them to "shut up and sit down," Piatelli said.
"We were all very scared," he said. "We did not know where he was taking us."
The passengers started calling the police for help.
At one point, the driver slowed down and Piatelli and others tried to get out the window, he said.
"Everyone was trying to get off the bus and he was trying to move it," he said.
The driver pushed a passenger who confronted him about where they were going, Piatelli said.
"When he pushed this guy, things started to deteriorate and snow snowballed," he said.
The driver finally stopped the bus at Carson, about 20 minutes from their destination. Piatelli said that he had escaped climbing through the window as the driver would not open the door.
The video taken by Piatelli shows him and other passengers standing in front of the bus and asking the driver to let out the other passengers.
"It was an abduction of what he had done, all we wanted to do was go to Dark Harbor," he said, adding that he was considering a lawyer and he would contact Queen Mary and the company that owns the shuttle.
"It's not OK," he said. "All this is really troubling."
Los Angeles police reacted and arrested the driver, identified as 60-year-old James Lee, shortly after 8 pm
The Long Beach Police Department said Friday in a statement that Lee had told them that he had become disoriented because of the closure of roads in the area and had been lost.
They said Friday in a tweet that the incident was not an abduction and that they were investigating a battery between the driver and a passenger.
Lee was booked and released pending the outcome of the investigation, police said.
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