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Wayne elementary school has no answers after 5-year-old dropped at wrong bus stop

A Goldsboro mother says two weeks ago, her 5-year-old daughter's school bus never brought her home. Instead, the girl was dropped off across town by herself and was returned home only when a couple living there saw her crying by the roadside and gave her a ride.

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By
Keenan Willard
, WRAL eastern North Carolina reporter
GOLDSBORO, N.C. — A Goldsboro mother says two weeks ago, her 5-year-old daughter’s school bus never brought her home. Instead, the girl was dropped off across town by herself and was returned home only when a couple living there saw her crying by the roadside and gave her a ride.

Since then, WRAL News has been pressing the school district to find out how this could have happened.

Every weekday at 3 p.m., Rayshene Seaberry has waited outside her grandmother’s home on Cardinal Drive in Goldsboro, where the school bus would drop off her 5-year-old daughter Za’Hara, a kindergartner at North Drive elementary.

But on Jan. 5, Seaberry said, when the bus pulled up and opened its doors, Za’Hara wasn’t there.

“So whenever that happened, it alarmed me,” Seaberry told WRAL News. “So I immediately got on the phone, called North Drive elementary school, and I talked to the principal.”

Seaberry said the school’s principal told her Za’Hara had been placed on a different bus that would be arriving shortly.

When 40 minutes passed with no sign of her daughter, a panicked Seaberry took action, driving towards the school to find out where Za’Hara had gone.

On the way there, her phone rang.

“I got a call from my grandmother, saying that my daughter, she had arrived with a lady in her car,” Seaberry said.

Back at her home, Za’Hara’s grandmother was relieved to find her granddaughter safe and sound.

But why was she brought home by a stranger?

That stranger was Jasmine McMillan, who told the family that minutes earlier she had watched as a school bus dropped Za’Hara off outside of her home in the West Haven subdivision, a full five miles from her normal stop.

McMillan told the family she’d seen the girl crying and starting to walk towards the train tracks.

“I looked at her as if it was my child, and as if somebody, you know, it’s just too dangerous out here in this area, period,” McMillan said. “And I didn’t want anybody to take her, snatch her up, do anything to her.”

McMillan and her husband drove the girl home, where Za’Hara told her grandmother she’d been put on the wrong bus by a substitute teacher, and nobody had listened when she told them about the mistake.

“Za’hara said at this time she got off the bus and turned around and tried to plead to the bus driver one more time, ‘I’m not supposed to be here, can you take me to my grandma’s house?’” the girl’s grandmother Melissa Seaberry told WRAL News. “She said the bus driver closed the door and drove off.”

The family said with Za’Hara back home, they called North Drive’s principal to ask for an explanation and were told the school would be putting safety protocols in place to stop similar incidents from happening again.

But two days later, the family claims one of their neighbor’s children was sent on the wrong bus from the same school.

“We were actually out looking for him, making calls and different things like that,” Melissa Seaberry said.

Since Jan. 6, WRAL News has been pushing for a response to the incident from Wayne County public schools, sending emails and calling, but the district hasn’t responded to any of our messages.

The Seaberry family said after what happened to Za’Hara, the district needed to take steps to better protect children.

“My grandbaby could have been kidnapped, she could have been trafficked, I mean anything could have happened,” Melissa Seaberry said. “And for these people to not have any emotion is a problem for me.”

“And it should be a problem for them, but it don’t look like it is,” she continued.​

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