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it was July 15 1976. 26 children were on their way home from summer school when three masked
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gunmen hijacked their school bus the buses had the windows down the Hot Summer Breeze the kids were laughing and
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singing and then this man came up with a stocking over his head with a gun and said open the door
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the first man came on the bus and he had a gun Ed Ray said what's going on and he said shut up and move to
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the back Ed Ray the bus driver had no choice but to comply with the gunman's orders and then another man came on the
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bus and he had a sawed-off double barrel shotgun the shotgun filled me with Terror
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26 school children and their bus driver have vanished anguished parents President Ford hundreds of searching
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police are asking the question where are the children just outside Chowchilla California the
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three masked men began driving the Dairyland elementary school bus down the road their destination completely
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unknown Larry Park was only six years old when he was kidnapped I was wondering how it
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was going to feel to die I was too scared to move Jody Huffington was 10. it's a hard
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thing to explain because I'd never been around guns you only seen bad guys in the movies with stockings on you know so
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I knew it wasn't good Jennifer Brown was nine eventually the bus went off the road
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down into a dry riverbed and into this big Grove of bamboo that were taller actually than the bus
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and then as I looked out one of the side windows I saw that there was another van
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that was parked there the kidnappers herded the stunned children from the school bus into two vins the Vans had
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been converted into makeshift jail cells where no one can see in or out they sped
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off with the children inside and I felt like I was an animal going to the slaughterhouse
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and we drove what seemed like for hours upon hours upon hours and a few of my um little friends that
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are five and six I came over and started laying on me and crying and I told them
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be brave because everything's gonna be all right the Vans eventually began to slow down lurching from side to side on
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rough terrain the kidnappers then forced everyone down into a hole in the ground
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the hole led to an old truck trailer buried underground the kidnappers had left jugs of water cereal a loaf of
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bread and some peanut butter in the wheel wells they had cut holes in them for toilets we could hear fans
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some sort of ventilation the kidnappers then covered the opening with a manhole cover
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I know it just went dark and you just hear the material getting throwed on us we were being buried alive
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they'd been in the trailer for almost 12 hours and the conditions began to deteriorate
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[Music] we had eaten the food the fans on the ventilator stopped we thought if we're gonna die we're
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gonna die trying to get out of here the children's stacked mattresses as high as
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they could go and began standing on each other's shoulders they took turns pushing up on the manhole cover
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I'm giving it everything I got and all the kids are cheering me on you know come on Mike you can do it you can do it
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then all of a sudden they said it moved it moved then suddenly this Ray of sunlight
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it's Rave sunlight came down into the opening it was catching the Dust and the dust particles looked like a
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bunch of shooting stars there was this airflow that came out of the van [Music] and I knew we were free
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I need a minute it was approximately 8 pm on July 16th they had been in the hole for nearly 16
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hours I'll just screw saw conveyor belts excavators it looked like the Flintstones and all
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these men with hard hats came to us and looked at us like who are you the kidnappers had buried them in a rock
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quarry a hundred miles away from Chowchilla after all of the children spoke to the
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police they were put on a Greyhound bus and sent home to Chowchilla where they were reunited with their families
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scene was like a mob [Applause] mobs I don't know I've never been a movie star before her nine-year-old
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Jennifer Brown the experience has allowed her to still see the world with compassion why do you suppose that they
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would do something like that they didn't have enough love foreign