Bus driver who saved students in 1976 dies

Hijack victims were buried in quarry

In 1992, Frank Edward Ray stood by the bus that he was driving when it was hijacked in 1976 near Fresno, Calif., with 26 summer school students on board. He bought the bus to save it from being scrapped and later donated it to a museum.

FRESNO, Calif. — Frank Edward Ray, a school bus driver who became a hero for helping 26 California students escape after three kidnappers buried them in a storage van in 1976, died Thursday of complications of cirrhosis of the liver. He was 91.

Mr. Ray was the only adult on board when his school bus packed with summer school students was hijacked near Fresno. They were later buried in the van in a quarry. Mr. Ray led them to safety after he and two of the older boys in the van dug their way out as the kidnappers slept.

No one was injured.

The dramatic incident made national headlines and was turned into a TV movie, They’ve Taken Our Children: The Chowchilla Kidnapping.

The driver and children all were from the small farm town of Chowchilla and the nearby community of Dairyland.

Many of the children stayed on in Chowchilla as adults and regularly visited Mr. Ray until his death.

Jodi Medrano said Mr. Ray’s actions during the kidnapping gave hope to the children.

Ms. Medrano, who was 10 at the time, said she held a flashlight, helped move mattresses, and never left Mr. Ray’s side while they were trapped.

“I remember him making me feel safe,” she said.

Mr. Ray’s son Glen said, “He told me that he felt it was his responsibility to get the kids back home to their parents safely, that’s all he could think about.”

Mr. Ray later recounted how he stopped the bus on that July day to see if the drivers of an apparently broken-down van needed help.

Three armed, masked men forced Mr. Ray and the children, who ranged in age from 5 to 14, into two vans and hid the bus in a drainage area.

The vans meandered for hours before stopping at a quarry 100 miles to the north in Livermore, Calif. The kidnappers sealed the children and Mr. Ray inside the storage van and covered it with 3 feet of dirt as part of their plan to demand $5 million ransom.

At the time, the Chowchilla Police Department was swamped with calls from reporters, and the kidnappers decided to take a nap before calling in their demand.

While they slept, Mr. Ray and two older children stacked mattresses, reached the opening at the top of the truck, removed debris, and emerged to safety.

Frederick N. Woods and brothers James and Richard Schoenfeld, members of well-to-do San Francisco peninsula families, were convicted in the kidnapping and sentenced to life prison terms. None of the three has been paroled.

The three, in their mid-20s at the time of the kidnapping, said they had fallen into debt because of a failed real estate deal and hatched the plan involving the bus as a way to rid themselves of financial worry.

Family members said Mr. Ray collected newspaper clippings about the kidnapping and bought the school bus he drove in 1976 for $500 as a memento and because he didn’t want it to go to scrap iron.

“He parked it in [the] barn and he’d go out and start it once in a while,” his son Glen Ray said.

He kept the bus for several years, Glen Ray said, and then gave it to a museum.