Don't Be a Victim

I remember one night, sitting in the hair and makeup chair at CNN-HLN headquarters, just before airtime. That means it was about seven p.m. because I hadn’t left yet to walk to the studio. I was on a conference call with staffers in New York, L.A., and Atlanta, talking about the lead story for that night. Just as we were finishing up, a phone buzzed. My longtime friend and makeup artist, Shayzon, got a call. Her face went ghost white as she listened to the voice on the other end.

When she hung up, she just stared at me blankly.

“Shay, what is it?”

I instinctively stood up, the long makeup cape still around my neck covering my clothes. She didn’t speak. I repeated the same question, and she answered in two words.

“Arlie’s gone.”

Arlie is her son, Arlington.

“What do you mean, Arlie’s gone?” I can still remember my words coming out harshly.

“He didn’t get off the school bus. He’s not answering his cell.”

Instead of hugging her, I immediately started firing off questions as we hurriedly packed all her things to leave. Where was he last seen? Where was her younger daughter? Was she safe? When did they realize he was gone? A million questions. Then the big question: Is there any reason to think he was ever on the school bus to start with?

We all rushed her to the elevator to leave, and on the way she collapsed and crumpled into a ball with her back against the cement wall in the employee hallway. I tried to pull her up, but she wouldn’t budge. I knelt down close to her face, and she said, “Nancy, I know what’s happening. We cover it every night…he’s gone!”

I will never forget the look on her face as long as I live…completely without hope. I hugged her and got her up and was saying all sorts of things like “We’ll find him. Arlie’s too smart to get into somebody’s car. He’s probably at some little friend’s house playing video games right now. I’ll be on my way there in one hour.”

She got on the elevator, and as it closed, she looked me in the face and said, “He doesn’t really play video games.” The doors shut and she was gone.

School buses have been around forever in our country. The sight of a yellow school bus trundling down the road is familiar and comforting. Nearly all of us have been on them, including during our early formative years en route to elementary school. We grew up catching the school bus, climbing up its steps, settling into a shared seat, and ending up, every time, safe at school.

Believe it or not, over 25 million children ride the school bus every day in our country. My dear friend Marc Klaas founded KlaasKids after his daughter Polly was kidnapped. He tells me that the dark side of that stat is that nearly 40 percent of all attempted child kidnappings take place when a child is walking or riding a bike to or from school or walking to or from the school bus. A friend at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children confirms those statistics and it took a while for me to grasp the numbers. Let that soak in: nearly 40 percent of all child kidnapping attempts are related to school, bus stops, and school routes.

Read on.

Ben Ownby

Rural Missouri. A straight-A student and Boy Scout jumped the last step of his school bus, hit the ground, and ran toward home. Beaufort was sunny that January day in 2007 as he ran down the gravel road. Minutes later, the boy’s friend spotted a white pickup with a camper top speeding away, but the Boy Scout, Ben Ownby, was no longer walking along the gravel road. He was gone.

Ownby’s parents were beside themselves. Where was their boy? In hours, searchers by foot, by air, ATV, and horseback were scouring the hilly terrain sixty miles south of St. Louis. Even with that incredible effort, they turned up nothing.

Days passed and then, finally, there was a break in the case. Kirkwood police officers spotted a white truck with a cab attached. Franklin County Sheriff’s Department, working off the truck’s plates, determined who and where the owner of the truck was and then descended on the home of Michael Devlin. Up until that time, Devlin, a white male in his forties, had no known criminal history and remained under the radar. When cops swarmed his place, they found Ben Ownby, alive. To their shock, they found another boy who had disappeared at age eleven from his parents’ home in Richwoods when he left to go ride his bike and never came back. Devlin had held the second boy, Shawn Hornbeck, for four long years.

Craig Akers, Shawn’s stepdad, had quit his job in software design to devote his time to a foundation named after Shawn. He and Shawn’s mom, Pam, drained their entire savings to search for Shawn, exploring all avenues, including psychics. At the time of his rescue, Shawn stated Devlin had ordered him to help “find” a younger boy to kidnap. Shawn feared Devlin was set to kill him once Devlin replaced him with a newer, younger victim. Since being found following four years of molestation in captivity, Hornbeck has disappeared from the public eye.

Alianna DeFreeze

It was cold in Cleveland, Ohio, the morning of January 26, 2017, when fourteen-year-old Alianna left for a bus to school at seven a.m., but she was bright-eyed and eager to get to tutoring early, so off she went. She had quite a trek to get to special tutoring before school, but it was a route she’d traveled often. The day passed as usual, but by four thirty, Alianna wasn’t home. Mom and Dad started an odyssey of frantic calls before, to their shock, they learned their girl never made it to school that morning.

But why? Her family had specifically signed up for text message alerts from the school to be notified if Alianna did not arrive or was ever absent. The school knew about Alianna’s developmental disability and that she practically never missed school. But because no text came, ten hours were lost, precluding an immediate and potentially life-saving search for Alianna. Realizing late in the afternoon that their girl never made it to school, her parents called police.

Weighing heavy on her family was the knowledge that with each passing hour, the likelihood of finding Alianna alive dwindled drastically. The search was on, including wading through security footage from the buses she took to school and their pickup and drop-off points. The young girl with long dark hair was spotted, which normally would have been a huge victory, but the surveillance video continued. It showed her getting off her bus en route to school, on time, around seven a.m. that morning. In the video, Alianna is smiling and laughing.

She crosses the street at East 93rd, but then she’s stopped outside a church by a man. She steps back away from him and continues on. As the video shows, he follows. Shortly after, the video shows the same man leading Alianna through a field toward Fuller Avenue.

Minutes, then hours, then three days passed by the time Cleveland police officer Willie Hodges and his partner were sent to check vacant houses. They found a house with the back door swinging wide open. When Hodges stepped through the doorway, he saw a trail of blood from the living room all the way to a closed door. Kicking the door open, he found the lifeless body of missing schoolgirl Alianna. Scattered through the abandoned home were Alianna’s school clothes, a bloody drill, a hammer, and a box cutter.

Cuyahoga County’s deputy medical examiner, David Dolinak, observed that Alianna’s injuries were so numerous and severe that he couldn’t positively say exactly which one caused her death. Police learned the man in the video, forty-five-year-old registered sex offender Christopher Whitaker, had followed her from her bus stop, forced her into the abandoned home, and then raped her, tortured her with a drill, and murdered her.

Alianna’s parents say the school’s negligence ensured that the last hours of their girl’s life were nothing but excruciating, paralyzing, and debilitating physical and mental pain. They claim the school lied when they said they tried to text the parents and that their system failed. The school says they’ve tried to be supportive of Alianna’s parents. I’ve listened as Alianna’s dad told her story, and the pain he is still suffering is just beneath the surface of every word.

Alianna’s twisted, heartless killer now sits on death row. In 2019, Alianna’s Alert went into effect in Ohio, a law requiring all schools to contact parents and guardians of children who are unaccountably absent from school. But it comes too late for one family.

Alianna’s parents still look out the window and imagine their girl walking up the path home.

Jaycee Dugard

It was bright and sunny on June 10, 1991, when eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard headed out on her morning trek up a hill to her school bus stop in rural Lake Tahoe. Mom Terry had left for work and stepdad Carl watched from the garage as she walked by. Doing chores in the garage, he could still easily spot her about a third of a mile away.

But then, at a distance, he saw a gray sedan make a U-turn and head back up the hill toward Jaycee, cutting across the road to swing open the door. In a flash, he saw his daughter being dragged into the car, and he watched it take off. He heard Jaycee scream. He chased after the car on his mountain bike but to no avail. Jaycee was gone.

That horrific moment started mom Terry’s descent into a chain-smoking alcohol-soaked hell, and even though husband Carl immediately called 911, she blamed him. But one day, Terry found her strength, making over a half million posters, collecting donations to search for her daughter, waking up when it was still dark outside to write hundreds of letters to the media, hospitals, and homeless shelters, begging them to be on the lookout for Jaycee and speaking with the press ceaselessly. She even went to casinos, rapping on car trunk after car trunk on car after car because a psychic “felt” Jaycee was imprisoned in a trunk.

The nightmare lasted for eighteen years. After several suspicious, unrelated incidents, feds raided the suburban home of Phillip Garrido, a sex offender on parole at the time Jaycee was snatched, and his wife, Nancy. The two lived just three hours away from the Dugard home. In a backyard shed, they found Jaycee, alive. With her were two other little girls. They were Jaycee’s. Their father was her kidnapper and tormenter, Phillip Garrido.

The horrible day Jaycee vanished, the two Garridos stun-gunned Jaycee and abducted her. For the next eighteen years, she was held captive and raped by Garrido. Today, Garrido and his minion are both in prison, and Terry has her daughter back. They lost eighteen years together. But the miracle is that Jaycee lived to make it back to her mother’s arms.

Etan Patz

On a sunny Friday morning, May 25, 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz sprinted out of his family’s apartment in SoHo, headed for school. After much practice, that Friday would be his very first solo trip walking the two blocks to his school bus stop. Etan was dressed in his black “Future Flight Captain” pilot cap, blue jeans, blue tennis shoes with stripes, and a blue corduroy jacket.

But Etan did not come home after school. Mom Julie called the school and discovered that while his teacher had marked him absent, she never notified the principal. Julie called police. Nearly one hundred police plus bloodhounds combed the area for weeks. Neighbors and volunteers joined the effort to canvass the city, flooding it with missing posters. Etan was the first child ever to appear on a milk carton, and even though his photo was projected larger than life on screens in Times Square, Etan never came home.

Decades later, it was determined that Etan was kidnapped and murdered the same morning he walked out of the family apartment. Pedro Hernandez confessed to the murder, and after one basement excavation that yielded nothing, one mistrial, and twenty years of heartbreak, Hernandez was finally convicted for Etan’s murder. One six-year-old little boy, Etan Patz, launched the missing children movement that lives to this day, major legislation, and the national milk-carton campaign. Etan’s case led to President Ronald Reagan declaring an annual National Missing Children’s Day, May 25. While all those accomplishments are irreplaceable, it is cold, cold comfort for Etan’s parents.

True cases of children gone missing in and around schools and bus stops go on and on. Each one is a heartbreak, but what can we do to fight back?

Safety Tips for Bus Stops, Bus Routes, and School Arrivals

• Instruct your child’s school to call and text you immediately if your child is absent, and insist that they follow through.
• Tell your child that, if confronted by a stranger, they should not worry about schoolbooks, backpacks, or belongings. Drop them and run.
• Put everything inside your child’s backpack or school bag and keep it secure so that the child doesn’t drop things on the way, causing them to bend over and be distracted. Don’t give a predator an edge.
• Never have your child’s belongings monogrammed or stylized with their name or initials. This makes it so much easier for a predator to get your child’s attention by calling out their name, and in that one moment they attack. Being called by their name also lulls a child into the belief the predator knows them and their family.
• Get your child to the bus stop ten minutes early. You do not want them left stranded and alone at the bus stop (or running in the street after the bus that just left).
• Walk your child to the bus stop, if possible. Same for after school. Be there if you can.
• If you do walk your child to the bus stop, wait for the bus. It won’t take long. Some of my happiest moments are getting the twins to school. We have so much fun, we get to talk and laugh and I hear about what they think will happen that day. I love it. It’s not a chore.
• If you can’t walk your child, try to have your child walk with another mom or dad that can or already does walk to the stop in the mornings. Same thing for after school.
• If there is no adult, have your child travel with a group. I walked to the school bus stop all through elementary school and also walked home after school. By the time I left for the bus in the mornings, both my parents were typically long gone for work. We were latchkey kids, so no one was there when I was walking home. I don’t know if my mom or dad warned me to do this—they must have—but we always traveled in a pack. Any child is more vulnerable when alone.
• Long story short: if you or another adult can’t walk your children to the bus, have them walk in a group with other children if possible. There is safety in numbers. Look at the animal world: there’s a reason they travel in packs. An added safety bonus is that drivers can spot groups more easily.
• If groups don’t form daily and naturally, join with other parents in the neighborhood to create a bus walk group.
• Walk the route with your child before they walk it alone. Use the most direct and the safest route. Avoid isolated shortcuts and abandoned structures, anything that is a spot where a potential predator could lie in wait. You won’t know this until you walk the route yourself.
• Train your child to stop, look left, right, and left again before crossing. This isn’t just to spot oncoming traffic. It’s also to spot cars slowing down to approach your child as in the Jaycee Dugard and Ben Ownby kidnappings and to spot anyone loitering nearby.
• Instruct your child not to become engrossed with games or devices like smartphones, Switches, and Game Boys at the bus stop. They need to stay alert to what’s happening around them. Also, horseplay can end up with someone being unintentionally shoved into the street.
• Teach your children to be especially careful in bad weather when they are focusing on an umbrella, a raincoat, and staying dry, and not on what’s happening around them.
• Go to the bus stop yourself and show your child where to stand. They need to stay at least ten to fifteen feet from the road not only to be safe from traffic zooming by (even though it’s a school bus stop zone) but also to make it more difficult to be snatched. If your child is five to ten feet from the street, a bad guy must get out of the car to get to your child. Jaycee was near the street.
• Move heaven and earth to get surveillance cameras at your child’s stop.
• If your child’s bus stop is on or near a neighbor’s property, take it upon yourself to get to know them. Visit, introduce your child, and get their number to program into your child’s phone if they have one. Don’t necessarily program it in by name because your child may not remember the name. Use an identifier such as “School Bus Stop Lady.” You never know when that number could make all the difference in the world.