Police Probe How Missing Disabled Boy Turned Up on Bus

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

“It’s a mystery as to what happened during that time,” Anaheim Police Sgt. Mike Hidalgo said Wednesday.

Officials with the California Highway Patrol, which regulates school bus drivers, said they plan to investigate.

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.

The boy 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 have 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 found out.