Vestal said she and Jones were friendly. The mother bought Jones Christmas presents. Vestal made Jones tea when she wasn’t feeling well. The two texted on occasion.

The bus paraprofessional had texted Vestal earlier in the year saying her son had a visibly poor reaction to one of the staff members, who he pushed and ran away from, the boy’s mother said.

Then Vestal said her son came home from school covered in bruises.

“When he did come home and we saw those bruises, the seed had already been planted,” Vestal said.

She assumed the other staff member Jones named had caused them and had a meeting with the school, saying her son should not be around this staff member again.

Vestal noted it can be difficult to determine whether a severely autistic child is hurting themselves throughout the day, so she and other parents on Jones’s bus chalked up other injuries — bruises, black eyes, scratches — to accidental injuries.

Vestal has a record of 15 dates when her son came home from school injured. Police, she said, confirmed three of those dates coincide with video footage of Jones’s alleged abuse.

An investigation is ongoing.

Months earlier, Jones had contacted the Joshua School, inquiring about bruises on her son’s arm, neck and thigh. Emails provided to The Denver Post show Littleton Public Schools employees talking about reviewing video footage from the bus to determine whether something happened there.

“We reviewed the video and there is nothing out of the ordinary that occurs during the ride home,” Michelle Molina, the Littleton district’s transportation operations supervisor, wrote in an email.

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