Alert Bus Driver Intervenes to Save Missing 8-Year-Old

An alert bus driver helped rescue a young boy Tuesday night from a man the boy’s family says has a troubled history.

Carlos Hill, 8, had been missing from his Anaheim home since early that afternoon, when he apparently wandered off with the man, 30-year-old Charles D. Ducksworth, and two young classmates.

Donnell Jones, an Orange County Transportation Authority bus driver, spotted the scared little boy and Ducksworth in front of a liquor store in Huntington Beach just before 7 p.m. Behind the wheel of his empty bus, his shift over, Jones remembered the boy and the man as passengers from earlier in the day.

“I thought, this isn’t right,” Jones said. “This is the little boy who was saying he had to go home a couple of hours ago.”

So Jones, who has driven an OCTA bus for two years, pulled over and used his radio to call for help.

Ducksworth was arrested by Orange County sheriff’s deputies on suspicion of false imprisonment, spokesman Lt. Hector Rivera said. The case is under investigation, he said.

Carlos’ mother, Kecia Hill, said she broke down in tears when she got the call that her son had been found. She had been going door to door in her neighborhood asking if anyone had seen him.

“It was like torture. I ran around frantic. He’d never gone off like that before,” Hill said.

She said that Ducksworth is the brother of a close friend but that Carlos did not know him well and that Ducksworth did not have permission to be with her son. Hill said that after the incident, she learned from Ducksworth’s sister that he has been treated for mental illness.

Jones, 35, who has an 8-year-old daughter of his own, said he would want a stranger to help out his child. He credited his bus driving training for his chance spotting of the boy.

“I was stopped at a red light and they teach us to look to both our sides, and I just saw them walk out of that store and something clicked in my head,” said Jones, who added that Ducksworth was incoherent when he tried to ask him why the boy was not at home.

Carlos’ mother said she is grateful that someone helped her son. Carlos told her he’d been in tears for a long while before Jones stopped his bus to help.

“That he took the time to do that reaffirms my belief in people,” Hill said. “A lot of people wouldn’t do that. Just look at all along the day when no one stepped in to help.”

Carlos, who was shaken but otherwise unharmed, said he was happy to be home. He said the day got scary after his friends got off a second bus they were riding, leaving him alone with Ducksworth.

“He wouldn’t let me get off the bus,” Carlos said. “I was happy he got took to jail. The bus driver saved me.”