Milwaukee kindergartner Cameron Smith was left on a GO Riteway school bus Monday after he fell asleep, and wasn’t found until his family tracked him down in the school bus company’s parking lot that night, police confirmed Tuesday.

Chenequa Byers-Smith, the boy’s mom, said Cameron was physically unharmed but traumatized. The 5-year-old was honking the horn on the bus for help when he was found, she said.

“It could have ended very differently had we not thought to go up there,” she said.

Byers-Smith said she started to get worried when Cameron wasn’t home by 5 p.m., the latest he ever gets dropped off by his bus. She tried calling his school, Milwaukee Academy of Science, and the bus company, GO Riteway, but she said no one answered the phone.

GO Riteway did not immediately return requests for more information.

At 6 p.m., Byers-Smith said, she called police. Byers-Smith said she asked police to search the school bus lot, but they told her they first needed to search her house and gather more information. Byers-Smith posted her son’s photo on Facebook and said he was missing.

In the meantime, Byers-Smith’s mother and two brothers set out for the GO Riteway lot 6300 block of West Mill Road. The boy’s dad was close behind. At 7:45 p.m., while police were still at Byers-Smith’s home, she said she got the call from her mom that the child was at the lot; the family had heard a horn honking.

The men jumped the barbed wire fence, calling Cameron’s name. Cameron figured out how to turn the light on in the bus, Byers-Smith said, so his family could find him.

“He was very cold and tired,” Byers-Smith said. “He was finally relieved that somebody knew where he was.”

Byers-Smith said the school bus usually boards around 3:30 p.m. so he had been on board for about four hours. She took her son to Children’s Wisconsin to see if he had hypothermia or had been hurt.

“He was OK, just really tired,” she said.

Byers-Smith said Cameron had fallen asleep and told her that when he woke up, it was dark. She said she wants to see consequences for the bus driver and bus company.

Earlier Monday, Milwaukee Academy of Science students were on a different GO Riteway school bus when it was struck by a speeding vehicle on Milwaukee’s northwest side, according to the Milwaukee Police Department.

In that incident, GO Riteway notified the school that two students were taken to a hospital with minor injuries, according to Milwaukee Academy of Science CEO Anthony McHenry.

A GO Riteway representative said the two incidents — the crash, and the boy left behind on the bus — were not related.

Contact Rory Linnane at rory.linnane@jrn.com. Follow her on X (Twitter) at @RoryLinnane. 

Contact Elliot Hughes at elliot.hughes@jrn.com or 414-704-8958. Follow him on X (Twitter) at @elliothughes12.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee student left behind on school bus, found at Riteway lot