A 4-year-old boy was able to walk away from Rosa Parks Elementary School in Fresno Tuesday afternoon and into a neighborhood across the street without anyone realizing it.
A neighbor’s surveillance camera captured the boy walking down the street, darting behind a car, and right up to Stephanie Gonzalez’s front door.
“I saw a little boy I’d never seen in my life,” she said. “He was small, he didn’t know anything.”
She answered the door, realizing he looked lost and confused.
And lost he was.
A tag on his backpack showed he belonged at Rosa Parks Elementary School behind her house, so they loaded him into her car and went back to the school.
“Very worried, very scared, [and] just wanted to make sure he was OK,” the boy’s mother, Lynette Sneed, said.
In a statement to KPRC 2, the school district acknowledged the incident.
“In an extremely unfortunate mix-up at dismissal time yesterday, a student followed a friend into the line for “walkers” instead of being directed to the Extended Day program and the student departed from campus. After being made aware of the mistake, school leaders contacted the parents to inform them and apologize. We are very grateful that our student was safely returned to our campus. School leadership is meeting with staff today to analyze where our dismissal system broke down and to put new measures in place to ensure an incident like this does not happen again,” the district wrote in a statement.
Sneed is just glad to have her little boy safe at home.
“It was a lot. It’s still a lot. I’m still very anxious thinking about it, honestly, but I’m just glad he’s OK because this could have gone in a whole different direction,” Sneed said.
And as a fellow parent, Gonzalez said she’s outraged.
“It could have been an abduction story or a missing child story. God forbid that would have happened,” Gonzalez said.
A reminder for Sneed, that she’s truly blessed.
“That just lets me know there are good people that still exist in the world,” she said.