Don't mess with Ann Lewis

An HISD bus driver is being hailed as a hero after she kept a gunman from boarding a bus carrying the Madison High School girls' basketball teams on Wednesday — by chunking her radio microphone at him. Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, right?

It all started when the girls were on their way back to Madison from a game at Lamar High. The bus stopped at a traffic light at Willowbend and South Post Oak and a man walked up and started pounding on the school bus's door and yelling that he wanted to board the bus. The driver, Ann Lewis, drove off when the light changed, but the man followed the bus in his car, and when the bus stopped at the light at South Post Oak and Orem, he walked up to Lewis's window, which he banged on with a metal object. When Lewis opened the window, she discovered the object was a gun, which the man — 40-year-old Robert Perry Sharpe — pushed through the window. That's when Lewis threw the mic at Sharpe and drove back to the school: "He started pushing it towards me and I realized it was a gun, so I hit him with the radio and I threw it at him and it bounced back to me," Lewis told KPRC.

Fortunately, she had called district police, who showed up and arrested Sharpe, who it turns out had been arrested for indecent exposure and unlawfully carrying a weapon in July. The cops found a loaded gun, condoms and pornography in Sharpe's car: "We had a man with a gun, pornography and condoms. That doesn't sound like a good mix," HISD spokesman Terry Abbott told the Chronicle. "Had he gotten on the bus with that gun, there's no telling what would have happened." Ugh.

Girls on the basketball team told police they had seen Sharpe at the game at Lamar. Though police didn't release their report to the Chronicle, the basketball coach, Felicia Ceaser-White, said he claimed that Lewis was driving recklessly and that someone threw a metal object out one of the bus's windows. We can only imagine how that went: "I saw that bus weaving in traffic and one of those damn kids threw something at me, so I got my gun, condoms and porn ready and confronted them." That ought to work really well.

HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra praised Lewis: "Our children were protected by this heroic school bus driver, who did her job and thought first of the safety of the kids," he told reporters. But for her part, Lewis said she was just doing what she had to do: "It was kind of scary at times. But now that I saw that everybody is at home safe and everything, I was thankful that we got away," she said.