Mom cries as she watches a video of her 5-year-old waking up alone on a locked school bus

A Chatanooga mother was left in tears when she watched her son wake up in an empty school bus. He had been forgotten that day.

Uneisha Bradford found it hard to stomach what she was watching. She knew there was a possibility it could have been much worse.

Cameras showed what happened when her five-year-old son woke up in a Special Transit Services (STS) bus last Friday and panicked.

Follow us on Twitter for more @amomama.

News Channel 9 reported that the bus driver drove into the parking lot and left the bus at the end of her shift. The abandoned boy spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get out.

Eventually, he managed to open the doors and step off the bus. He was lucky enough to be helped by kind strangers soon after he left the bus.

The young boy was supposed to arrive at Chambliss Center for Children that day. But he was still asleep when the bus reached its destination.

Philip A. Acord, the director of the caregiving institution, explained:

"The STS driver is supposed to walk through, which she did not do."

A Chambliss worker should also have checked the vehicle. Acord said:

"Our teachers are supposed to walk through... She looked under the seat and said she looked for legs and book bags and didn't see anything."

He added:

"And then when the driver gets back to the STS and she parks her bus, she's supposed to get up and go back again."

The driver never did her walk-through. The boy was sitting on the seat just behind her towards the front.

The employee was placed on probation after the incident, but Bradford says the bus program was already due to shutdown month end because of a lack of funds.

As for the school, they will give workers training to prevent future instances like this one. Bradford revealed that her son no longer wants to use the bus after the occurrence.

Bradford pointed out:

"What if those people weren't out there? Anybody could've gotten him or if he was still wandering the parking lot."

A similar incident happened in January 2018 on a Jimboomba State School bus. Alyssa Jayde Langdon, five, spent hours on a bus instead of going to her first day of school.

Her mother raised alarm that evening when her daughter didn't return home. Again, the driver did not do a walkthrough while Alyssa slept. Thankfully she was unharmed.

Back in November, a school district took steps to prevent deaths surrounding children getting in or out of school buses. The bus drivers would be allowed to position their buses across the lanes.

This will safeguard children from other vehicles that may be trying to illegally pass the bus. A video of a school implementing the move went viral on social media.

Parents were thankful for the extra precaution considering the increasing deaths of young students.

We are empathetic to the parents who have lost or nearly lost their kids due to the inconsideration of others on the road or behind the wheel.