“This way!” 5-year-old Jackson Kirby called out to his parents. Heading up Maud Avenue on Thursday evening from Fairview Elementary, he retraced the route of his fateful three-mile walk home alone after the first day of kindergarten.
All week, everyone has been asking how the school lost track of Jackson instead of escorting him to an on-campus after-school program. But how did he find his way home? How did this little boy, barely taller than a picket fence, wearing a bright red backpack and matching sneakers, manage to find his way through the streets of Hayward during the busy Monday lunch hour without anyone noticing?
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Even his parents, Duana and Larry Kirby, both postal carriers, are baffled.
“He was invisible,” his mother, Duana, 37, said. “He was invisible the whole way.”
So on Thursday night, at the request of this news organization, Jackson recreated the walk home from school that seemed like an adventure to him but a nightmare for his parents.
Guided by two landmarks he recognized, a church steeple and an abandoned tower, he followed what ended up being a circuitous journey from the hills to the flat lands, past a boarded-up house, vacant lots, two liquor stores and across six lanes of traffic.
“I know this way,” he said proudly as he made his first turn onto D Street. “This is the way my mommy drove me.”
He raced ahead — of his parents, a reporter and photographer — jumping over tree stumps, tiptoeing through ice plant.
Jackson is an energetic and joyful boy. He bounces as he walks. He skips. He hums. He peeks through holes in fences, and when he gets to a corner he stops and looks both ways. On D Street, a mostly residential, busy street with a double yellow stripe down the middle, he walked one-and-a-half miles straight down the hill. Cars streaked past even as he re-enacted the journey at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, after his parents finished work and the sun began to set.
When the sidewalk disappeared, he navigated a narrow gravel path, careful to stay out of traffic.
“Mom! Dad! This is where I saw this!” he said, crouching down and pointing to shattered glass from a car window piled on the edge of the curb.
A few more blocks, he passed an old brown couch, then three more lined up along a driveway.
A few unsavory-looking characters passed by Thursday evening, but who knows who Jackson might have encountered along the way home on Monday? He says he spoke to no one.
For better or for worse, even that is bewildering to his parents.
“They got out of school early. No other kids were walking around,” his mother said. “You see this little boy walking with his backpack and nobody says anything. Nobody stops. Nothing.”
But it didn’t seem to bother Jackson. Was he scared? “Nope,” he says.
It’s one thing to drive to school — with Jackson buckled in the back seat — as the Kirbys have for years with Jackson’s older siblings. But walking the route themselves on Thursday evening — past vacant lots with empty beer bottles, dense bushes where people could have been hiding, bridges over homeless camps — only heightened their anxiety and anger at the school for letting him slip away.
“They act like everything is OK because he made it home safely,” Duana said.
The school, she said, never called her to say their son was missing. Jackson did. An hour after classes let out at 12:20 p.m., he called his mom from home. Stunned, she rushed back to the apartment on the edge of downtown Hayward, then called the school. School administrators didn’t even know he was gone, she said.
Hayward School District officials remained tight-lipped Friday. They issued a statement earlier in the week saying they are treating the incident “very seriously,” that safety and security “is our highest priority,” and that they are “investigating to determine what steps need to be taken to ensure that this does not happen again.”
Jackson’s mother said an aide was supposed to escort him and some classmates to the after-school program on Monday. But Jackson was in the bathroom and the aide apparently left without him. When he returned, the classroom was empty — so he started his walk home.
On Friday, district spokesman Dionicia Ramos said she couldn’t confirm the details of the Kirbys’ account, saying “the entire sequence of events is being investigated, so I don’t have additional information to share.”
Larry and Duana both work full time for the U.S. Postal Service. Jackson is the youngest of their four children and, like many Bay Area families, their lives are a hectic mix of daily activities and a carefully orchestrated patchwork of supervision. Duana drops the three youngest kids off at school in the morning, and by 5:30 p.m. Jackson’s older cousin picks them up at the after-school program on campus. Their grandmother, who lives with the family, is home when they arrive. The parents are home for family dinner an hour later. They’re not supposed to worry when the kids are in school.
The Kirbys consider themselves strict parents and don’t let the kids play beyond the driveway. They allow their eldest to walk a mile home from high school, but she is 14 and 5-foot-9. Jackson is 3-foot-9 and not old enough to read street signs.
But he knows the big white tower in the center of downtown Hayward. It’s just a few long blocks from home, and he sees it from nearly every window. It’s the old City Hall, abandoned and fenced off after it was damaged by the 1989 earthquake. At 11 stories high, the white concrete building with ribbons of black windows is still the tallest in town.
“It’s right there!” Jackson pointed out during his re-enactment Thursday. “The ones with the stripes. I saw it and I kept walking.”
Child abductions always have been rare. But one of the most notorious child kidnappings in the Bay Area occurred just seven miles away in south Hayward — the 1988 abduction of 9-year-old Michaela Garecht from a grocery store parking lot when she was riding her scooter home with a friend. She has not been found.
Still, parents yearn for the romanticized days of their own childhoods, when they remember walking home from school and not worrying about predators. Should the fact that Jackson made it home safely reassure us that we shouldn’t have to worry so much?
Jackson wouldn’t know. He was busy skipping ahead, exploring the streets of Hayward on Thursday night.
“Thank God he made it home,” said Craig Hall, who spotted Jackson parading down D Street on Thursday night, followed closely by a photographer. He had seen his story on the news. “If I had seen him, I would have done something.”
Farther down the road, an 84-year-old man who spends most days swinging in the hammock in his front yard said he didn’t see him on Monday either. Neither, apparently, did the woman who sells fruit on D Street.
It doesn’t appear anyone noticed as he passed by the Grande Market on D Street, or when he crossed mid-block to follow the steeple on top of All Saints Catholic Church, another landmark he recognized from his morning rides to school. No one apparently questioned him as he passed R & H Liquor store on Second Street. No one at Subway or Supercuts, no one at Citibank or Wells Fargo or IHop or the Sunshine Center Cleaners. Was the boy alone? Did he need help home? Apparently, no one asked.
Jackson had no cell phone, no GPS device in his backpack. When he lost sight of the white striped tower, he headed in what must have seemed like the general direction, which took him a few blocks out of the way. He turned right at the purple graffiti sprayed on a fence at C Street. “I found it!” he called to his parents. Down the block, he turned left on Third, then crossed B Street and went left, returning to Second Street again.
As letter carriers, both his parents have walked this route from time to time. Though they weren’t obvious Thursday evening, they pointed out where a pitbull is usually chained up on a front porch and where they’ve seen discarded drug needles.
“He doesn’t know the gravity of what could have happened,” Larry, 54, said.
Duana lagged somewhat behind as Jackson kept up his quick pace. She shook her head and covered her mouth.
“Lord knows how many people could be hiding somewhere, people driving by and turning around and following him,” she said. “That’s what keeps playing in my head.”
But those dangers didn’t seem to concern Jackson as he snaked along a fire lane, between a real estate building and an old parking garage and behind the blocked off and abandoned white tower.
“Oh my God, there’s no telling what could have been back there,” she said, tears running down her cheeks.
They ducked under a chain crossing the old driveway entrance to the now-shuttered city hall, headed out to Civic Center Drive and the final stretch home.
“He knows where he is now,” his father said.
But he would have to make the most dangerous crossing yet — six lanes of speeding traffic on Foothill Boulevard, just a few blocks from the Interstate 580 onramp. Again, Jackson pushed the traffic signal button and waited for the light to turn green.
He passed the gas station and the site of the demolished Mervyn’s store, then marched up to his home at the next rise.
“Our house is right there, Daddy,” he said.
He looked both ways at Main Street. “Cross, cross, cross. Go, go go!” he said as he darted across the street. “I made it!”
The three siblings were home with their grandmother. The lights were on.
He scampered up the wooden staircase to the second-floor apartment, took off his bright red sneakers and walked inside. Hanging in the entrance hall was a placard listing the “Kirby Family Rules.” They include sharing, listening to each other and saying please and thank you. “Be kind. Respect each other. Do your best. Give lots of hugs and kisses.”
Duana took a deep breath and sat down at the dining room table. The tears welled up again. Since Monday, she has been leaving work at noon to personally escort Jackson to his after-school care. She’s going to continue until she’s confident he’s safe.
Yes, she said, she has one brave little boy.
“But didn’t anybody wonder?”
