A Milwaukee kindergartner’s parents are outraged yet relieved after they located their son alive and well on a school bus four hours after he didn’t return home from school.
He was found honking for help.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, kindergartener Cameron Smith, 5, boarded the bus around 3:30 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 8, to leave his school, Milwaukee Academy of Science, and head home as usual. But when Cameron didn’t return home around 5 p.m., the latest he had ever been dropped off, his mother, Chenequa Byers-Smith, grew worried. She called the Milwaukee Academy of Science, and the bus company, GO Riteway, but no one answered the phone. Byers-Smith decided to ask the Milwaukee Police Department for help and requested they search the bus lot located at 6301 West Mill Road. But the police decided to check her house and collect more information. The 5-year-old’s mother also put out an alert on her Facebook.
As police checked her house, Byers-Smith’s mother and two brothers went to check the GO Riteway parking lot. At 7:45 p.m., Smith’s grandmother called his mother with good news. They found Cameron in the lot after hearing him honking the horn.
Byers-Smith’s brothers hopped the barbed wire fence and called for Cameron, who turned on the light inside the bus to help them find him.
“He was very cold and tired,” Cameron’s mom said. “He was finally relieved that somebody knew where he was.”
Byers-Smith took Cameron to Children’s Wisconsin to check if he acquired hypothermia or any physical harm after being abandoned on the bus for four hours.
Cameron was physically fine but spent. It turns out the 5-year-old boy fell asleep on the bus only to wake up in the dark and see he was alone.
Go Riteway said the employee was fired and failed to follow safety protocols at the end of their shift, which was to scan the bus seats to ensure no child was still on. The bus company also said it would cooperate with authorities investigation.
A similar incident happened to a then-5-year-old in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, named Ronnie McMillon, who fell asleep on a bus ride to Hope Christian School Fidelis in 2018.
He was supposed to arrive at 7:40 a.m., but an hour later, his mother received a text from the school informing her he was “marked absent.”
His mother recalled putting him on the bus that morning.
The bus driver went to another school before receiving instructions to search for Ronnie, who was on the bus for four hours. The driver discovered Ronnie and got him to school at 9:45 a.m.
