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NEED TO KNOW
- A 5-year-old kindergarten student from Amador County, California, was left stranded miles from home after boarding the wrong school bus, his mom says
- Hendrix Camden’s mom was left “panicked” after her son’s normal bus arrived without her boy. “I was hoping, praying that he didn’t get kidnapped,” she said
- Hendrix was recovered by an employee of Kamps Tree Services, who found him “wandering” along a “winding mountain” road
A 5-year-old boy was left stranded miles from home after getting on the wrong school bus in California.
On Thursday, Oct. 9, student Hendrix Camden, 5, boarded a school bus after class at Amador County Unified School District that dropped him off at the wrong location, his mother told CBS News Sacramento
“Yesterday, his normal bus driver showed up and we made eye contact, and he goes, ‘Hendrix isn’t on my bus today,’ “ his mother, Twilight, said of the incident.
Twilight — who confirmed Hendrix has special needs and had only recently started kindergarten — said that another child on the bus told her that her son had gone on a different bus, per CBS News.
“I said, ‘Hold on, what do you mean he got on the other bus?’ ” she recalled, sharing that she then started to panic.
Twilight said that she was left worrying for her son’s safety. “I was hoping, praying that he didn’t get kidnapped,” she said.
Over an hour later, Twilight received a phone call letting her know that her son had been found, three miles from home.
“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 told the outlet. “And I assumed it was a van driver, or he was just put on a different route or something.”
An employee at Kamps Tree Services said that they came across Hendrix “wandering down [a] winding road” and looked after him until his mother arrived.
“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,” the Kamps Tree worker said, per the outlet. “He just wasn’t sure where he was at, and I tried to make him comfortable … until his mother came.”
Hendrix walked a quarter of a mile down the two-lane, winding, mountain road before he was found, his mother told CBS News.
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Twilight is now searching for answers from those responsible for letting her son board the wrong school bus. Hendrix himself told CBS he was “sad” about the incident.
“Protocol is for a kindergartner to be released to an adult or a parent, and if there’s not anybody there, you don’t have signal. You keep driving to the next stop and you call then,” she said. “It just wasn’t handled correctly.”
“All I want is for the schools to know what’s going on, transportation, to know what’s going on, and something to get figured out right there,” Twilight added.
The incident is being investigated, according to CBS News Sacramento.
PEOPLE has reached out to the Amador County Unified School District and Amador County Sheriff’s Office for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.