A 4-year-old boy is feeling “traumatized” after he was left alone on the school bus. If that wasn’t enough, the bus driver then left the child with a stranger. Thankfully, the stranger was a good person, and returned the little one to the school, where family picked him up.
Now, the school has a lot of questions to answer about how such a thing could have happened. The driver has been taken off the bus route, but no word on whether or not they’ve lost their job. This is terrifying story with a positive ending that could have been much worse.
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The whole experience sounds terrifying.
Mom Myeisha Marks was celebrating her birthday two hours away from her home in Horry County, South Carolina, on December 5, 2024, when she received a phone call no parent wants. Her son Shamiar Smith Jr., didn’t get off the school bus, according to his aunt. The 4-year-old boy wears a tag with his name and information on it. His aunt gave the information to the driver, but they claimed they couldn’t find him.
Everyone had their signals crossed.
“I was two hours away, and the first thing she said was ‘Junior didn’t get off the bus,'” Marks told WJBF. She added: “I panicked, like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’ I just hung up the phone, called the school.”
When Marks called Aynor Elementary School, staff there called the bus driver. The driver claimed he found the boy asleep under his coat in the middle of the bus. He then claimed to have given the pre-K student to a neighbor. But when his aunt went to the neighbors, they told her they hadn’t seen him.
The boy had been left with a stranger.
When Marks called the school back, they told her her son was in the building. And when his aunt picked him up, they told her a “stranger just dropped him off.” The next day, Marks asked to see footage from the school bus. She claims that the boy “wasn’t even balled up on the coat.”
“He was laying against the window,” she told People. “His face, everything was exposed.”
“Our school bus protocol includes a system of checks and balances to guarantee that each student is accounted for as they arrive at their bus stop,” a spokesperson for Horry County Schools told the outlet in a statement. “Currently, we are reviewing our tagged child program to determine if any areas of our processes can be refined to improve the safety of the program.”
The mom spoke to the stranger who had her son.
Marks was able to speak to the stranger who made sure her son got back to school safely. “I was thanking her for getting him back to the schoolhouse,” Marks said, adding that the woman told her the boy “was terrified.”
“She was like, ‘He was so scared. He was scared to go with me. He was scared about the whole situation,'” the mom said. Marks told People that she filed a complaint, but as of December 19, she hadn’t heard back. However, she did say the principal reached out and apologized, saying this kind of incident would “never happen again.”
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Now, her son is afraid to get on the school bus.
“He’s very traumatized right now,” Marks says of her son, who is in the process of being diagnosed for autism. “He’s like, ‘No, I can’t ride the bus because they’ll give me to a stranger.'”
“I have to talk to him every day, like, ‘No, they not going to give you to a stranger no more. It’s okay. Mommy’s got you.’ So it’s a lot on me, too.”
