Westport Bus Driver Arrested For Making Threats to Students

A Westport bus driver has been charged for allegedly making sexually inappropriate remarks and threats to students while driving a bus full of Coleytown Middle School students last month.

The Dattco employee turned himself in to the Westport Police Department on an active arrest warrant Tuesday. The arrest stems from an investigation following an incident on October 18 involving nearly 25 middle school students who were passengers on a bus he was operating in Westport, according to the arrest report. The students were between 11 and 13 years old.

Westport police charged 44-year-old Daniel Florio, of 39 Kensett Avenue, Norwalk, with risk of injury to a minor, second-degree threatening, and breach of peace. Florio was released on a $10,000 cash bond and is due in Norwalk Superior Court November 29.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Interested in Westport's news, events, community bulletins, blogs and businesses? Sign up for the free Westport Patch daily newsletter, "like" us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

________________________________________________________________________________________

The police department received numerous complaints from middle school students and their parents reporting offensive and irrational behavior by their school bus driver, the arrest report states.

During a Board of Education meeting last month Westport parents explained that their children were “terrorized” and that they “arrived home in tears.” 

“The most terrible part of this incident is that our children informed the school that the driver of Bus 16 was frightening them and making sexually inappropriate remarks, yet when they left school at the end of the day to go home, he was still driving their bus,” Jarrett Liotta, a Coleytown Middle School parent, said following the incident.