A Philadelphia mother is speaking out after her 6-year-old son walked home alone from his summer camp Tuesday.
“I walked home to go home and my mom wasn’t there,” Dennis Hollis told NBC10. “She found me already. I was missing.”
Hollis’ mother Latrice Evans told NBC10 she was running late to pick up her son at the Inspiring Minds Summer Enrichment Camp at Clymer Elementary School. When she arrived the doors were locked and the camp staff had left.
“I’m starting to panic right away because I’m like, ‘Well, where’s my son?’ You know, no one called me to say, ‘Well he’s not here’ or ‘Where are you,’” Evans said.
Evans then called police who canvassed her neighborhood. Unbeknownst to Evans, her son was walking to their house unsupervised.
“The lights were going red to green so I walked,” Hollis said.
The boy told NBC10 it was the first time he’s ever walked home by himself.
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“He’s home looking for me. I’m at the school looking for him,” Evans said.
Police eventually found Hollis walking home, unharmed.
“They called the officer who I was with, who helped me and she told me that around 5:45 that they found him walking the street by himself,” Evans said.
Andrea Garner, the head of the Inspiring Minds Nonprofit Program, told NBC10 safety is the camp’s top priority.
“We separated our walkers from our pickup people into a different room so that there’s no way that any pickup people who are to get picked up by their families can get mixed up with the walkers at all,” Garner said.
It’s unclear how the boy managed to leave the camp alone. Garner told NBC10 it was the first time something like that has ever happened at Inspiring Minds and insists it will be the last.
“This was definitely an unfortunate and isolated incident,” she said.
While Inspiring Minds uses Clymer Elementary as its facility, the school is not involved in the camp’s daily operations.
