The driver responsible for the fatal Carroll County school bus crash still works for the county’s school system, despite a rule saying he should have been fired.

The news came Wednesday as the parents of the teen killed in that tragic wreck sued the driver and the Carroll County School System for what they called a “needless” death.

“It could’ve been prevented,” Diana Lockett said. “My son didn’t have to die. Nobody deserves to lose their child at school.”

The parents of 17-year-old James Rashaun “Ray Ray” Walker on Wednesday said they wanted to send a message to the school system.

“I can’t hug my son anymore,” Antonio Walker said. “I want to get [the message] out there so that they’re scared to let it happen again.”

Rashaun Walker died on Oct. 4, when he was partially thrown through a window of the bus and crushed with a driver trainee behind the wheel.

Lockett and Antonio Walker lodged their civil complaint less than a month after an investigative report by the Georgia State Patrol revealed that the driver, Kenneth Ross Herringdine, was groggy from cough medicine when he drove the bus over a culvert and caused it to flip off the road.

“There is no question that James Rashaun Walker died a horrific and needless death,” the complaint reads, pointing to conditions leading to the wreck the suit claims were preventable. “James Rashaun Walker died an excruciating death, suffocating as he was being crushed to death by several tons of steel.”

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