Graffiti Dispute Pits Driver Against Students : Santa Clarita: Bus riders jeer the transit employee, forcing her to call for help. Deputies search the eighth-graders for a marker, but no one is arrested.

New Orleans had a streetcar named Desire. Santa Clarita has a bus that could be called Aggravation.

As the bus rolled down a canyon road, a drama unfolded pitting adolescent rowdiness and graffiti against a driver proud of her shiny, new vehicle.

The result: A tearfully furious bus driver and a long line of eighth-graders “assuming the position” against the side of the bus as deputies searched them for purple and white marking pens.

The face-off began about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday as Santa Clarita Transit employee Laura Lemons wheeled along Soledad Canyon Road with a busload of about 20 students returning home from Sierra Vista Junior High School.

Lemons thought she saw one of the boys scrawling graffiti, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said.

She called the boy to the front of the bus to bawl him out.

But the other youths began screaming and shouting at her, deputies said.

“He walked up to the front of the bus, but all of the students started shouting at her saying he wasn’t doing anything wrong,” said Sgt. Tom Davidheiser. “They got all verbal with her. They gave her a lot of verbal abuse and she began crying.”

After several minutes of enduring taunts and jeers, she pulled over at Sierra Highway, ran into a local business and used the phone to call for help.

“They’ve damaged my new bus,” Lemons sobbed. “I’m scared. I’m not going on that bus again,” she cried to onlookers.

None of the passengers were seen fleeing.

Many got off the bus and sat on the sidewalk or carried on boisterously, awaiting deputies who arrived about 4 p.m.

The deputies calmed the driver and inspected the bus, Davidheiser said.

“Our deputies saw graffiti on the inside of the bus.

“But no one was seen writing it,” Davidheiser said. “We couldn’t tell how fresh it was.”

Deputies then ordered the entire busload of students to face the side of the bus and lean against it, hands upraised and feet back, while the officers frisked them for implements of vandalism.

One student had a marking pen, but it failed the evidence test.

“It was a black marking pen that was recovered, but it wasn’t the same color as the graffiti, which was white and purple,” Davidheiser said. “We can’t prove a crime happened. . . . So we didn’t make any arrests.”

A new driver was sent in another bus to transport the passengers, deputies said, and Lemons drove her bus back to the yard alone.

Lemons was back at work Thursday driving her regular route, said transit officials, who declined further comment on the incident.