A severely autistic teenager sparked a desperate search after he failed to turn up at school – only to be discovered hours later slumped in the back of a bus that should have safely transported him there.
Jimmy Hudson, 13, who is selectively non-verbal, fell into a deep sleep after he was left on the sweltering bus – which had been parked outside the driver’s home at the end of his shift – for more than two-and-a-half hours.
His distraught mother Tracy, 45, from Westcliff in Essex, has lashed out at school transport firm Vecteo, owned by Southend-on-Sea City Council, for their ‘negligence’ and said an apology was not enough.
‘A sorry doesn’t cut it if my son was lying in a morgue,’ she told MailOnline, adding Jimmy was physically unharmed but has been left emotionally traumatised by the distressing incident last Monday.
Remembering the events of that morning, Tracy said she had escorted Jimmy – the first of 13 children picked up each day – onto the Vecteo bus as it made its way towards St Nicholas School in Southend.
Aside from the bus driver, the vehicles always carry two personal assistants (PA) to assist the youngsters.
Tracy thought all was well, but at about 10 am she received a call from the school telling her Jimmy had never arrived.
‘What is supposed to happen is that the children are led off the bus by the PAs and taken to a little alleyway that runs down the side of our school. It’s completely safe and there’s CCTV.
‘The teachers stand a bit further down in that alleyway waiting for the children to arrive.
‘But hours after Jimmy left home, the school rang me to ask where he was because they could not find him.
‘My first instinct was that something was not right.’
The school first assured Tracy that they would perform a thorough search because they thought the teen may be hiding someplace on the property.
Staff searched security footage after failing to locate Jimmy, but they were unable to observe him enter the school premises.
By this point, Tracy had made her way over to the school, which had also now involved Essex Police.
Vecteo was contacted several times, but according to Tracy she and the school were repeatedly assured by bosses that Jimmy had ‘definitely’ left the bus.
‘There must have been about four calls. Every time they said he definitely got off the bus, we saw him leaving.
‘Then one of the PAs changed their story and said they thought he did leave, but they were not quite sure.
‘My son is not a flight and fight child. He’s not one to escape and doesn’t cope in the outside world. He is riddled with anxiety and sensory process and is selective mute, along with his autism.
‘The headmistress and me knew this was not him, it was so out of character.
‘There were only two solutions – he was still on that bus or somebody had taken him.’
The bus driver was by now sleeping at home, but the police officer demanded that Vecteo contact him to search the vehicle.
Outside temperatures that day in Southend were about 23C, but the internal temperature of the locked vehicle would have been extremely higher.
‘The driver told me after that when he went back onto the bus, he could see a black coat at the back of the vehicle. He looked down and all he could see was a pair of legs.
‘The driver then said four times to Jimmy, “You need to wake up” and every time he got louder, but there was still no response.
‘He told me that he panicked, that he’d never felt fear like it because Jimmy didn’t respond – and he didn’t know what he was going to see underneath that coat.’
Fortunately, the teenager did not suffer any physical repercussions, but Tracy said he is still processing the incident and has been emotionally harmed.
‘Just this afternoon he’s come home from school and said: “They could have killed me, couldn’t they?” And I told him, yes, they could.
‘You wouldn’t keep an animal in a car, so why on earth is it okay for a child to be locked on a bus?’
The shocking incident is the latest in a raft of complaints previously levelled at the transport company, which started in 2021 as a joint venture between London Hire Community Services and Southend-on-Sea City Council.
These complaints were the subject of a council motion as well as a petition in 2021 calling on the council to stop using Vecteo.
The petition drew more than 1,000 signatures after service users alleged there were ‘serious safeguarding concerns’.
These included children and vulnerable adults being left on the side of the road, parents waiting hours for collection – and in one case, a child who was ‘blue on arrival home’ after they had an epileptic fit while on the bus.
MailOnline was also told by a Southend-On-Sea City councillor of another distressing incident in which Vecteo employees attempted to deliver a child to the wrong home address.
Former Conservative councillor Tony Cox, who now acts as deputy mayor and leader of the Southend Reform UK Group for West Shoebury told MailOnline that while the service level provided by the firm has since improved, scores of residents had continued to flag ‘colossal safeguarding issues’ against Vecteo.
‘There’s been a catalogue of these incidents over the last four years and it’s just not acceptable.
‘I cannot for the life of me understand how something like this could have happened – and then to even tell the parent their child has been offloaded and dropped at school when that’s not the truth.
‘I do think there should be a serious probe into what happened here.
‘It’s just a miracle nobody has been killed.’
MailOnline understands that Vecteo and Southend-on-Sea City Council have launched an internal investigation into this latest incident.
A Vecteo spokesperson said: ‘The safety and wellbeing of all children in our care, particularly those who are more vulnerable, is always our highest priority.
‘We take this extremely seriously and are working with Southend-on-Sea City Council to urgently investigate these matters to ensure this cannot happen again.’
Compensation won’t help, of course, but Vecteo should be penalised heavily if it helps to keep another youngster safe. If that doesn’t work, they should be banned from performing.
Some may argue that the PAs, who are responsible for the protection of the children, were to blame rather than the driver. On and off the bus, there ought to have been a head count.
As a mother with an autistic son – this would have been horrific for the youngster.
The company had a job to do, and they should have taken enough care to do it correctly.
Kids get up to all manner of mischiefs, and making sure that they were all delivered to the school should have been part and parcel of their work. The driver and the PA’s need to be sacked, and the transport company should have lost their contract, especially after misleading the school and mother by telling her that her child had indeed been dropped off at school.
He’s a bus driver, an experienced driver, probably holding a PSV licence, and as a driver, he would have had a duty of care to all his passengers, regardless of their age. A duty in this case, which he didn’t follow.
Perhaps it is speculation to say that the youngster has been emotionally harmed. However, even if he were asleep, if he had been in the vehicle much longer he could have perished from heat stroke because that would have been the result if he had been in there any longer or if the temperature had shot up.
Why did the company not have a policy of counting on and counting off the bus? It’s not rocket science, but it does involve using common sense which apparently this company do not have.
This is truly terrible – this could have quite easily been a fatality. Our vulnerable children – all children should be kept safe – fact!
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