In July 1976at the end of another common school day, an entire school bus was hijacked by three masked men. The kidnapping of Chowchilla, as is known to most people, it is perhaps the largest kidnapping in US history, 26 children and the driver: after 45 years, the survivors of that mobile hell speak.
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The kidnapping of Chowchilla
The quiet of the town of Chowchilla was interrupted on July 15, 1976 at 16 local time, when a school bus, containing 26 children aged 5 to 14 and the driver was hijacked by three armed men, wearing pantyhose over their faces.
After abandoning the service bus, the hostages were forced to get into vans, used as rudimentary prison cells, and endured 12 hours of torture before being crammed into a truck trailer hidden underground.
The survivor, Larry Park declared: “At 6… the only way I could describe that darkness is that my time had come.
Another survivor says “I felt like an animal going to the slaughterhouse.”
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The children were practically buried alive in the Livermore quarry for 16 hours, while the swindlers tried to ask desperate family members a $ 5 million ransom. This request could never be made because the lines of the telephone exchanges were clogged with calls from desperate parents to the police.
Escape and condemnation
Meanwhile older children and the driver, Edward Ray, they managed to open the lid with a piece of wood and dig a rudimentary gap in the debris that covered the bus. They then dug out the rest of the debris blocking the entrance.
They managed to get to the quarry guard shack, near Shadow Cliffs East Bay Regional Park, while the authorities had already found the school bus.
When the police found them, they took a photo of each child and forced them to interrogations lasting 6 hours, before taking them to a place where they could heal them and comfort them from the shock they suffered.
Investigations continued until the involvement of the quarry owner’s son, the 24-year-old, was discovered Frederick Newhall Woods IV, the only one who has the keys to the quarry.
Him and his two friends, the accomplices brothers James and Richard Schoenfeld, were already known to the police for car theft.
The Schoenfeld brothers were released on bail in 2015, while the next probation hearing for Woods is scheduled for 2024.
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