She’s a prisoner in her own home.
Wheelchair-bound teenager Chantel Quiroz only leaves her walkup apartment in a Bronx public-housing development when two muscular men carry her and her shiny blue chair down two flights of stairs to board a school bus — although her mother asked the city Housing Authority for a handicap-accessible unit more than a year and a half ago.
“She can’t do anything besides go to school, and they don’t care,” sobbed her mother, Damaris Santiago, 37.
Like a typical high-school girl, Chantel, 15, readies herself for school early each morning. But because of a rare degenerative neuralgic disability, her mother must slide on the teens uniform khaki pants, crisp white shirt, and maroon sweater before sweeping her thick brown hair into a ponytail.
The preparatory ritual takes place each day before the school bus pulls up at the Edenwald Houses at 8:10 a.m. to take the teen to Bronxwood HS.
While the bus waits, one brawny bus assistant clutches her chair’s footrests, and the other man lifts the chair’s handles. They carry the ninth-grader downstairs as if she were a piece of furniture.
“I get nervous,” Chantel said, “because I feel like they’re going to drop me.”
Santiago applied for a handicap-accessible apartment in July 2009. Right now, Santiago resides with her mother Ana Nieves, 56, inside the three-bedroom unit on East 229th Drive.
Santiago said her paperwork has bounced from one authority office to the next.
After a Post inquiry, the authority admitted that a paperwork error occurred, and that it plans to move the family March 1.
