FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — Greyhound Lines has apologized to a Texas man who sued the company after a driver forced him off a bus at a station in Kansas at the dead of night, accusing him of being unruly and uncooperative.
Mohammad Reza Sardari was traveling from Dallas to Kansas City, Missouri, in November 2017 when he was kicked off a Greyhound bus at a bus station in Wichita, Kansas. Sardari, a Ph.D. candidate at University of Texas-Arlington, was heading to a national conference in Kansas City to present his research on inequality in the Dallas Area Rapid Transit System.
Last November, Sardari filed a federal lawsuit in Dallas against Greyhound, saying the company discriminated against him because he’s Middle Eastern after the bus driver saw his name on the ticket. Sardari, who is Iranian, said he was “abandoned in the middle of the night at a dark and closed bus station.”
At the time, Greyhound said it had investigated the incident and found that Sardari was removed because he refused to show his ticket when he was asked. The company said it called the police to remove Sardari after he refused to leave the bus, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
In a statement last month, Greyhound retracted its previous claims that Sardari had been unruly.
“Greyhound also fully retracts its statement that police were called to remove Dr. Sardari from the bus he was riding,” Greyhound said in a statement on Sept. 17. “Greyhound sincerely apologies to Dr. Sardari regarding the events that occurred.”
The company maintains that it didn’t discriminate against Sardari.
Sardari’s lawsuit says the bus driver and passengers started yelling at him to get off the bus, which Sardari recorded on video.
“On the video, Dr. Sardari can be heard calmly asking for an explanation as to why he was being asked to leave the bus,” the lawsuit contends. “Neither Greyhound security not the driver provided one.”
