Josephine Amaya is livid. When her fourteen-year-old son Keanu Gallardo was injured during a football game at San Jose’s Del Mar High School, and ambulance was summoned to take him to the hospital. It drove up to the field then stopped, a gurney was taken out, and pushed 75 yards to the boy. He was strapped in and rolled 75 yards back to the ambulance, which then took him to hospital. The ambulance crew says that they were not allowed to drive on the football field by Del Mar principal Liz Seabury.

Matthew Dean, a Campbell Union High School board member, said he was “aghast” at the principal’s decision. Terry Peluso, a spokesperson for the Campbell School Board, agreed. He said that school had banned motorized vehicles from the playing field when it was remodeled, “but we never meant emergency vehicles.” The problem, he says, is that Seabury is new at the job and did not make that distinction.

Peluso also said that the incident is being investigated, but this was not good enough for one parent. Debbie Musquez shot back at him, “The child’s health needs to come first and that’s most important, and to actually hear this coming from you instead of coming from the school is actually disturbing, too.”

Gallardo has since been released from the hospital. Students and staff at the school will not comment on the incident, but parents are up in arms about it. “Who cares about damage to the field?” asked Maria Garcia, a parent at the school. “That could be paid by all of us, the taxpayers, right?” The school district now claims that the ambulance stopped where it was supposed to stop and did not request to proceed any further, but this is contradicted by a report in the Merc that Amaya heard the ambulance crew arguing with the principal. Seabury called her discussion with the crew was “civil.”
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