Former North Penn school bus aide sentenced to county jail for choking special-needs student
A Montgomery County Court judge told Macarthur Williams that he had demonstrated a fundamental betrayal of his role as a school bus aide by strangling the boy for seven seconds.
Macarthur Williams showed no remorse for choking a 6-year-old boy with special needs he was tasked with protecting, and had victimized an entire community by letting his anger get the better of him, a Montgomery County Court judge said Wednesday.
Williams, 73, was sentenced by Judge Stephen T. O’Neill to five to 23 months in county jail for the assault in October 2023, which the veteran judge said demonstrated a fundamental betrayal of his role as a school bus aide for the North Penn School District.
“When you get to your age and your life experience, given the nature of your training in the Army, you are expected to be above, not on the same level as, a child,” O’Neill said, adding that he was shocked by the surveillance video depicting Williams’ actions. “You must think: ‘How can I protect and teach this child without making it personal?’ You made it personal.”
Williams pleaded guilty in October to strangulation and endangering the welfare of a child for squeezing the boy’s neck for approximately seven seconds after warning that he would “choke him out,” prosecutors said Wednesday.
He did so after the boy, who has been diagnosed with ADHD, hit Williams with his seat belt in an attempt to get him to play a tug-of-war-style game that he saw other children near him playing, according to a statement from his mother that prosecutors read in court.
The bus driver told police that she saw Williams assault the boy and yelled at him to stop, according to court filings. Williams told the driver that he “had to teach him a lesson or he would think it was acceptable to continue to do.”
The boy came home that day visibly distressed, his mother said, and has been undergoing therapy to deal with the trauma of the assault ever since. His neck had red marks and scratches, according to the affidavit of probable cause for Williams’ arrest.
“Hearing this and seeing this was the most painful thing I have experienced as a mother,” she said. “Knowing I wasn’t there to protect my son from someone that has no compassion, empathy, or patience for a child, for someone he is supposed to be helping — I honestly saw red.”
Williams’ attorney, Robert Gamburg, asked O’Neill for leniency, noting that his client served two decades in the Army and was diagnosed in 2007 with PTSD. The arrest in this case was his first.
Gamburg said Williams understands he is guilty of the crime, and pleaded guilty to the assault to spare the victim’s family from a trial. But he asked the judge to sentence Williams to probation, saying the incident was a “knee-jerk” reaction to being struck by the seat belt.
“There is not a doubt in my mind that this is a one-off incident where, for a brief, short instance, he lost control of his actions,” Gamburg said.
But Assistant District Attorney Caroline Goldstein, who prosecuted the case, said that nothing the children did that day warranted Williams’ actions.
“He was entrusted to take care of the kids on the bus. He was supposed to protect them from bad things happening to them,” Goldstein said. “He wasn’t supposed to be the person they needed to be protected from.”