Andrew Sipowicz walked up to his red 2012 Ford Mustang on a residential street near his Buffalo apartment and stopped cold. The front driver’s side was mashed in. Under the windshield sat a handwritten note in a child’s careful printing, complete with a drawing of a school bus and kids peering out the windows.
It was November 2018. Sipowicz, then a 21-year-old Canisius College senior and baseball player, had parked along Blaine Avenue. A roommate mentioned a school bus had been uncomfortably close earlier. When Sipowicz checked after 5 p.m., the damage and the note told the rest of the story.
The note, signed “a 6th grader at Houghten Academy,” explained that Bus 449 had hit the car while trying to squeeze past parked vehicles at the regular drop-off spot.
“She was trying to pull off and hit the car. She hit and run,”
it read.
“She made a dent and I saw what happened. Sorry.”
Bullet points listed the damage location and that the driver was a woman. The drawing showed the bus that had done it.
The writer was Ziarra Griffin, an 11-year-old sixth-grader at Houghton Academy. She and her brother had been the last students off the bus. They watched from their mother’s car as the driver struck the Mustang and kept going. Griffin later said she expected the driver to come back and check. When that did not happen, she returned and left the note.
“My mom always said, ‘When you see somebody doing the wrong thing, you have to do the right thing,’”
she explained.
Sipowicz posted photos of the damage and the note on Twitter on November 20 with the caption,
“Shoutout to the anonymous 6th grader for saving me a couple thousand (Bus not drawn to scale).”
The post spread rapidly. A teacher recognized the handwriting. First Student, the company operating Buffalo Public Schools buses, confirmed the incident, covered the full repair costs plus a loaner vehicle, and terminated the driver.
Sipowicz met Griffin and her mother, Tocarra.
“When I first saw my car, I was angry and then I saw your note and it changed my entire mood,”
He told her. Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown later presented Griffin with the city’s Civilian Award of Merit.
