On a hot summer day in 1976, three masked men boarded a school bus in the town of Chowchilla, CA and kidnapped the driver and all twenty-six children aboard. The kids and their driver were transferred onto soundproofed vans, driven for hours, and buried alive in an underground chamber. With little to eat or drink, air rapidly running out, and the roof buckling from the weight of thousands of pounds of dirt the kidnappers had used to cover the chamber, one of the children lead a harrowing escape effort. The apprehension of the kidnappers and subsequent revelation of their identities only added to the shock of an event that would haunt those who survived it for decades as they struggled to regain all they had lost.
