Does a real video show a bus driver named Linda Thompson or Derek Harris being hit by a rock thrown by children? No, that's not true: The names were inserted into template-based stories where the details are essentially the same except for the bus driver's name. There is no evidence that people by those names were involved in such incidents, and the images used in the videos are from a variety of unrelated cases.
The claim appeared in a post and video by the @blockapunk account on X on Oct. 5, 2026. It read:
This is the same as today in Europe
This is what a screenshot of the video in the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @blockapunk on X.)
The video is embedded below:
This is the same as today in Europe https://t.co/9WrrAqNqom
-- VigilanzPunk (@blockapunk) October 5, 2026
The video said:
Narrator: Several teenagers laughed and danced in court, convinced they would be going home soon because they believed their age would protect them from serious punishment. ...
But the judge's next words made their smiles disappear instantly. 62-year-old Linda Thompson was driving a school bus carrying 16 students when several teenagers standing by the side of the road suddenly started throwing rocks at the bus. One of the rocks was about the size of a fist and hit Linda directly in the chest, breaking four of her ribs. After three hours of emergency treatment at the hospital, she miraculously survived.
The request for juvenile sentencing is denied.
They were then prosecuted as adults and ultimately sentenced to five to 10 years in prison. Do you support the judge's decision? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Two of the videos with references to drivers with the names Linda Thompson and Derek Harris trace back to the TikTok account of @oiegs42, which is the watermark in the X video above. They were uploaded to the platform in late September and early October 2026, respectively. Both were identified as having been edited with CapCut, a video-editing app with AI features. The CapCut name can be seen in the lower left corner of the screenshot below:
(Image source: post by @oiegs42 on TikTok.)
Another video, again with a driver named Derek Harris, appeared on the Instagram account of @InsideScope on Aug. 18, 2026. It read:
Five Teenagers Injure a School Bus Driver by Throwing Rocks, Then Laugh in Court--Until One Sentence From the Angry Judge Wipes the Smiles Off Their Faces.
#news
#court
#fyppppppppppppppppppppppp
#crime
#breakingnews
The video includes the same basic storyline and many of the same video clips of the children in court. Many clips differ, however, such as the judge for the case and unrelated school bus video clips. The video was narrated by a different voice.
The video is embedded below:
Video analysis
The Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool (archived here) concluded that a small segment of the Linda Thompson video from the @oiegs42 account included AI-generated content (13.1 percent confidence, because only a small portion is AI), and it was narrated using AI-generated speech (98.9 percent confidence). The Hive tool can only analyze short videos, so Lead Stories had to break it into three shorter clips. The three analyses are stacked below:
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
The sections containing the bus driver show higher AI-generation ratings in the analysis. The sections that were not AI-generated appear to consist of generic images of school buses and generic crime-scene clips.
The images in the video are from random places. One shows a St. Croix (Wisconsin) Central school. Another one shows officers with Columbus Police on the back of their uniforms.
News searches
A Lead Stories search on Google News and Yahoo News did not return any matching results from established news outlets using the search terms: "bus driver," "Linda Thompson," "rock," "children" and "video."
A second Lead Stories search on Google News and Yahoo News did not return any matching results from established news outlets using the search terms: "bus driver," "Derek Harris," "rock," "children" and "video."
Several of the teens shown in the courtroom scenes in the video are from a 2016 case in which they were accused of stealing a car and taking it on a joyride.
A report by WSVN-TV, including some of the clips, is embedded below:
