‘Lost’ Teen Prompts Inquiries

Anaheim police are investigating how a developmentally disabled boy could have gone missing Monday only to be found seven hours later in a cold, dark school bus--especially considering that the bus driver said he had dropped the teen at home on schedule.

“It’s a mystery as to what happened during that time,” Anaheim Police Sgt. Mike Hidalgo said Wednesday. Investigators “are trying to figure out what happened . . . and if there is criminal culpability.”

Officials with the California Highway Patrol, the agency that regulates school bus drivers, said they also plan to investigate and possibly notify the Department of Motor Vehicles of the incident.

Officials in the Orange Unified School District, where James Jimenez, 21, is employed to drive special education students home from school, said they are conducting their own investigation to determine how they could have lost 15-year-old Jonathan Darling, who was born with Down syndrome and has the mental capacity of a 5-year-old.

Jonathan was not physically harmed, but his foster parents, Lora and Michael Foglesong, said he was traumatized by the incident.

District policy requires that drivers walk through the bus at the end of the route to check for lost items and then mark a card to show they’ve made the inspection and put it in the vehicle’s rear window.

Orange Unified Supt. Barbara Van Otterloo said that as part of its investigation, the district checked into whether the driver had filled out that card. She declined to say what the district had learned.

But she added that the driver had indicated that he remembered dropping Jonathan off at his Anaheim Hills home Monday. Jimenez declined to comment.

Jonathan’s foster parents say it’s obvious that didn’t happen. They want the district to create a special phone line for parents to call after hours if children are missing. And they also say the district should assign someone besides drivers to check buses each afternoon, to make sure that all students have arrived home safely.

“We have a lot of questions,” said Michael Foglesong. All Jonathan could tell them about his ordeal was “he was scared but he didn’t cry.”

Most afternoons, Jonathan arrives home from his special day class at Villa Park High School at around 3:30.

By 5 p.m. Monday, he still had not come through the door, and Lora Foglesong was frantic.

She called the district, but got an answering machine.

Her husband went to the Anaheim Police Department and filed a missing person’s report.

Her older son, who works as a teacher’s aide in the Orange Unified School District, searched through classrooms at the boy’s high school.

Finally, a family friend tracked down transportation officials with the district and the Foglesongs got in touch with the school bus driver.

He told them he had dropped the child off at home on schedule.

Panicked, the Foglesongs, along with their neighbors, searched through backyards and posted fliers with his picture at a local market. “I felt like I was in a horror story,” said Lora Foglesong.

The Foglesongs have nine special-needs children. One is their biological child; four are adopted; two are foster children; and two others, including Jonathan, are in the process of being adopted.

With all these children, they have never experienced such an incident before, Lora Foglesong said.

Once again, they called police, this time dialing 911.

By now, it was after 10 p.m. Following every lead possible, police officers visited the bus yard in Orange.

When they got to the bus on Jonathan’s route, Jonathan opened the door for them. He was unharmed but terrified, the Foglesongs said.

Sgt. Hidalgo, of the Anaheim Police Department, said he is not aware of whether it is even a crime for a bus driver to fail to drop off a child.

But he said investigators are determined to find out what happened during those hours the boy was missing.

Meanwhile, Jonathan will go back to school this morning--in his mother’s car.