They Hired a Man with a Prior Child Abuse Conviction to Watch Autistic Kids. What Happened Next Will Make You Sick.

Tyler Zanella. Melody Carter. Galit Gottlieb. Four different people. Four different schools. One system that kept doing the same thing over and over and over again. In Colorado, Tyler Zanella had a prior child abuse conviction on his record. They hired him anyway. As a paraprofessional. To drive a school bus full of autistic children. So on the bus, Zanella hit them. Kicked them. Knelt on them. Slapped them. Verbally assaulted them. 37 separate incidents, captured on camera, over one month. Eleven kids. One bus. One man the school district put in charge of them despite a background check that should have ended his career before it started. Daisy Montgomery got the phone call on a Tuesday evening. Her son Ash was autistic and non-verbal. He was five years old. "You feel like you're so close to your child, like you could almost reach through the video and just save your kid or stop what's happening, but you can't," she said. The Poudre School District settled for $16.2 million. Zanella went to prison for 12 years. Ash will flinch when someone leans in to kiss him. He'll flinch for the rest of his life. And this is just the one we know about. Here's what happened at Burton Elementary in Fort Bend, Texas. A mother named Crystal Mendez has a 9-year-old non-verbal autistic son. She started noticing bruises on him. In February. In March. She couldn't figure out where they were coming from. She assumed it was part of his condition — something about how he moved, how he was different, how things just happened to autistic kids sometimes. Then another parent posted on social media. That's how Crystal found out her son had been manhandled by staff at his school. Not from the school. Not from a teacher. From a parent's Facebook post. The district confirmed: multiple employees at Burton Elementary were fired after "valid allegations" of abuse and injury. The Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office is investigating. Crystal said the school's principal told her: "We only look at cameras when an allegation is made." She asked the principal directly: "You mean to tell me you couldn't have stopped these teachers from hurting my child? You had to wait for him to be abused first?"