By BIRIDIANA LOPEZ-RODRIGUEZ
Staff Writer
Frank Jr. Edward Ray was born on February 21, 1921. He was one of eight children, and at a young age, he and his family moved to Chowchilla, California. Along with his wife, Odessa, Ed bought a farm and had successfully grown corn and raised cattle for 10 years. They also had two children named Gleen and Danny. In the 1950s, Ed decided to become a school bus driver for the local school district. He was super dedicated to his job and highly respected by school staff and students that rode his bus every day. On July 15, 1976, Ed was spending his summer transporting kids to and from summer school. Everyone expected it to be a normal day, so he picked up the kids after school and went on his usual route. There were 26 kids in total on the bus—19 girls and 7 boys all ranging between the ages of 5 to 14. Ed soon encountered something odd; a van was on the side of the road. Ed stopped, thinking that they needed some help, but he never anticipated 3 men to emerge from the van and covering their faces with pantyhose. When he saw one of the men carrying a sawed off shotgun, he immediately knew something was wrong. The men told Ed to step away from the wheel and he complied, wanting to keep the kids safe and calm as the strangers took over the bus.
One man was driving, one holding the shotgun, and the other was driving the van behind them. They drove for a while until the man suddenly drove the bus off the road and into a dry riverbed that was surrounded by bamboo. The bamboo was tall enough to cover the entire bus. The van was brought as close to the bus as they could get and ordered the kids to jump into the van and made sure nobody touched the ground. They drove for 12 hours, and they had no food, water, or bathroom stops. The back of the van seemed to be very chaotic, especially with how terrified the younger kids were. Even though the older kids took the responsibility to try and comfort them by singing songs and telling them everything was okay, nothing could distract them from the misery they were going through in being forced to be inside the back of a cramped van in the July heat. The families of the parents began to panic. It was scary for one kid to go missing, but a bus full of 26 kids and an adult missing was a nightmare.
The parents would help the police out by telling them the usual everyday bus route. Within hours, they were able to find the abandoned bus, and 30 FBI agents had arrived on the scene where an intense investigation began. The van that was holding everyone soon came to a stop, and people were taken out one by one. They started with Ed and then just grabbed the kid nearest to the door and locked it again. But with such a long drive, nobody knew if they were still in California. One by one, everyone was asked for their name and age before being taken to their next location which had a wooden ladder that took them down into a space they referred to as the hole. In fact, it was an old truck trailer that had been put in a huge dugout space that went 12 feet underground. Inside, there were mattresses, food, water, and makeshift toilets. One of the survivors, Jeniffer Brown Hyde, commented that they could hear fans which turned out to be the makeshift ventilation system. Once everyone was in the trailer, they took out the ladder and said that they’d be back for them. They closed the lid, leaving them in complete darkness. That’s when they heard one thump after another. Their captors were shoveling dirt onto the trailer and burying them alive. Once everyone started to realize what was happening, they all began to freak out. Ed tried his best to keep everybody calm because he knew that if hysteria broke out, then they really wouldn’t be able to make it out.
Ed and Michael Marshall (the oldest kid in the group), started to push on the lid to see if there was any chance of getting it open. When it was no use, Ed gave instructions for everyone to eat something, drink water, use the bathroom, and get some rest. This gave everyone the chance to calm down and regain their strength. During this, Ed was making a plan of escape and after 12 hours, everything started to go downhill. The food was gone, and the ventilation system had suddenly stopped working. Ed knew that their time was running out, especially when he noticed the roof starting to cave in. One boy was kicking blocks from 4×4 pillars, and so the roof started to cave in, the seams were breaking, dust was flowing through the sides of the van and were bowing in. Many of the survivors, now grown up, had said that on that day they knew they weren’t going to make it out alive, but Ed and Michael weren’t ready to die yet. They started to pile up the mattresses and managed to reach the roof. They also took turns pushing at the hatch to try and shift the dirt.
They started to feel hope when Michael managed to move the cover which was about half a foot. Ed had pushed Michael through the hole and Michael saw that rather than burying them in only dirt, they had put two truck batteries that weighed 100 pounds on the lid of the trailer. They also put some dirt and then covered the scene with a wooden box. Michael pushed and shoved at the box until he managed to break through, but he didn’t stop there. There was even more debris on top of the box, but he kept digging. Despite being exhausted from the heat, dehydrated, and starving, he managed to dig through. On July 16 at 8 pm, the group had finally managed to escape and were trying to figure out how to get back home since they were over 100 miles away from Chowchilla. They were trapped in a quarry near Shadow Cliffs Regional Recreation area in Livermore, California. Ed led the group towards the quarry and found a security guard. He told the security guard where they were from and that they were lost, and the guard called the police. They were transported to the nearest place that could accommodate them.
After they were given apples, soda, examined by doctors, and interviewed by police, they were put on another bus and taken back to Chowchilla. Their families were waiting to reunite with them. The guys behind all of this were Frederick Newhall Woods, James Schoenfeld and his brother Richard Schoenfled. The three came from wealthy families, but due to carelessness with money, all three men found themselves deep in debt. They had carefully constructed the plan to hijack the bus with everyone inside it and demand for a 5 million dollar ransom. When the men woke up from resting after their mission, they were shocked to find out that the group had escaped. They immediately fled, and it took two weeks to track them down. The reason they were found was because the security guard at the quarry had caught them digging the hole months before, and when the police got a search warrant, they found the shotgun as well as a ransom note. All three men were captured and arrested, and they were all sentenced to life with possibility of parole. Richard was released in 2012, James in 2015, and Fredrick remains in prison after being denied parole in 2019. Ed continued to drive until 1988 when he retired and ended up passing away in 2012. In the days before he passed, he was visited by most of the kids he had helped escape that day.