Mecklenburg DA to reexamine CATS bus driver assault case following Observer report
Two teen girls attacked a CATS bus driver on the job a year and a half ago. Her case may finally move forward in court after a recent Charlotte Observer investigation about assaults on CATS bus drivers prompted the district attorney to reexamine the incident.
Mecklenburg County District Attorney Spencer Merriweather’s Office requested bus driver Sheila Andrews’ medical records a couple of weeks ago, so court staff can start a case against the teens who hurt her, Andrews and her former colleague David Harris, told the Observer.
Two-minute video footage of the January 2025 assault, released this week by CATS in response to a public records request from the Observer, shows two girls reaching around the driver-area barrier and striking Andrews as she sat in her seat. As they rattle the barrier, a passenger steps in and forces them off the bus.
The assault left Andrews with a broken nose. She also started losing her peripheral vision shortly thereafter, though her doctors could not definitively tie that to the attack.
Andrews, whose 20-year career centered around driving buses, had to surrender her commercial drivers’ license and get on disability benefits.
Andrews was one of nearly 40 CATS bus drivers who were physically assaulted from 2023 through 2025. Another 100-plus drivers were attacked verbally. A Charlotte Observer investigation found that bus drivers here are assaulted a rate three times the national average.
David Howard, chair of the newly formed Metropolitan Public Transit Authority, said safety and security are the organization’s highest priorities.
“Violence or assaults of any kind have no place on our transit system,” he said in a statement to the Observer.
CATS bus driver was assaulted — but got no answers
Andrews had tried to find out what was going on with her attackers for months, calling Merriweather’s office repeatedly and leaving messages with her contact information. It wasn’t until the Observer repeatedly contacted court staff this spring that the juvenile team leader called Andrews.
The Observer provided the court with Andrews’ phone number.
The juvenile team leader, Heather Taraska, told Andrews that court staff had tried to reach her at the phone number left on the police report, which was a non-working city number. And then they didn’t try again.
Taraska said that one of the teens completed a diversion program and a case was dismissed. It was unclear from that call whether both teens had faced the same consequences. Taraska told Andrews she didn’t know why no one returned Andrews’ direct calls. She apologized, according to the conversation shared by Andrews.
But Andrews was furious. This was not the closure she wanted.
“I would like to confront the girls and their parents. I’m not saying that I want to see them put in jail,” Andrews said. “But I want them to understand that their actions have consequences.”
Mecklenburg DA acknowledges Andrews’ frustration, bus driver says
A couple of weeks after the Observer published its investigation in early June about bus driver assaults, Andrews got a call from the District Attorney’s Office to come in to talk.
During a June 26 meeting, Taraska told Andrews she’d given her the wrong information about the girls, according to Andrews and Harris. Taraska said she had no idea how severe Andrews’ injury was prior to the Observer investigation, and asked her to write up what happened to her and file her medical records.
District Attorney Merriweather, who was also in the meeting, told Andrews he could understand her frustration, Andrews said.
Merriweather’s office declined to comment on the case because it involves juveniles. But both Andrews and Harris, who joined her for the meeting, separately recounted the same information.
Police categorized what happened to Andrews as a simple assault. Most simple assaults don’t result in arrests, including one that happened to a different bus driver named Tierra Mack.
Mack was attacked by a crowd who threw bottles and bricks at her during her shift in 2024. Police interviewed Mack and the people who attacked her, but said she would have had to go to a magistrate and request the criminal process to pursue charges.
She didn’t know she needed to do that.
CATS does not track what happens to driver assaults cases
Exactly how many bus driver assaults resulted in arrest or prosecution is unknown. Though CATS cooperates with police and provides video footage and related documentation, the agency does not track the outcome of those cases.
CATS staff will accompany bus drivers to court if they want support, but do not proactively get involved in court cases or push for prosecution on individual cases.
“We fully support our federal, state and local law enforcement partners in holding individuals accountable for criminal activity on our transit system,” said CATS Interim CEO Brent Cagle.
In some other states, it is automatically a felony to assault a driver. Here, it is not.
The North Carolina Public Transportation Association, which represents 95 public transit agencies in the state, has tried to get state lawmakers to change that here. But the issue hasn’t gotten much traction.
“If you get injured on a CATS job,” Andrews said, “you’re basically on your own.”
This story was originally published July 15, 2026 at 1:09 PM with the headline "Mecklenburg DA to reexamine CATS bus driver assault case following Observer report."
