A typical school day took an unexpected turn for 5-year-old Hendrix Camden, a kindergartner with special needs, when he was mistakenly dropped off several miles from home by a school bus driver, reported First Alert 4.
The incident reportedly occurred the afternoon of Oct. 9, when Camden boarded a school bus after class at an Amador County Unified School District elementary school east of Sacramento, California, just as he had every other day. But his usual driver noticed something was wrong.
“Yesterday, his normal bus driver showed up, and we made eye contact, and he goes, ‘Hendrix isn’t on my bus today,’” said Twilight Camden, Camden’s mother via the article.
Unbeknownst to her, Camden had been loaded onto a different bus, one that would drop him more than three miles from his home, on the side of a remote, winding road. “I was sad,” Camden recalled.
Panic set in when Twilight arrived at the bus stop, only to find her son missing. Then came a phone call from an unknown number. “I get back to my car, and I’m getting a phone call from a random number, and they’re saying, ‘Hey, we have Hendrix,’” she said. “And I assumed it was a van driver, or he was just put on a different route or something.”
Instead, the call was from an employee of Kamps Tree Services, a local tree-trimming company, who had found the young boy walking alone along the two-lane road.
“The kid, he came walking from around the corner over there and came up to this first house here, and since there was nobody there, he came around this way,” said one worker via the news report. “He just wasn’t sure where he was at, and I tried to make him comfortable, gave him a water bottle and a cookie.”
Twilight Camden said her son had walked roughly a quarter mile on his own before encountering the workers.
“There’s nowhere for him to be that could have been safe, and I was hoping, praying that he didn’t get kidnapped,” she said.
The district protocol requires kindergarten students to be released only to an adult or parent. “If there’s not anybody there, you don’t have signal, you keep driving to the next stop and you call,” she emphasized.
Twilight Camden is now demanding accountability from the school district and its transportation department, urging them to review their procedures to ensure this never happens again.
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