Missing Morgan
Well, today one of my nightmares for Morgan almost came true. At 2:40 p.m. today, I got a call at work from a Plano policeman asking if I knew where my son was. He gets out of school at 2:30 p.m. I told him as far as I knew, he was at school. He then told me he had him in his squad car at a major city street corner (three lanes of traffic in either direction, for six total) where he had wandered a mile and a half or so from school.
I ran out of the office and drove like a freaking maniac to where he was. I tried calling Ash three or four times, but she was downstairs waiting for the bus to drop him off. I called my boss, since I didn't see him on my way out, and left him a message. Unfortunately, I forgot to hang up, so the last part of my voicemail was me yelling profanities at someone on the highway who didn't yield and let me onto the exit ramp. I then realized it and hung up.
I finally made it to the corner shopping center where they had him. There were two officers in separate squad cars, standing around with Morgan and laughing at his antics. He loves police cars, by the way, and he was happily looking around in the squad car. The officer explained that he was on a routine traffic stop and saw Morgan walking down the sidewalk a distance ahead of a woman. As the woman got closer, she yelled at the police officer that he was escaping or getting away. He didn't think anything of it, since he thought Morgan was her child. Then she said that he wasn't hers, and that he was just wandering around on his own.
He got him settled and called me (he has an ID tag on a necklace with contact numbers). Five minutes before I got there, he was notified that the school had called police to report him missing. I thanked everyone and took Morgan to the school to pick up his backpack. The other officer was already headed over to the school to find out what happened. They were leaving when we got to the school.
He's fine, but when I think what could have happened, I get a chill up my spine. I have a meeting with the principle and teachers tomorrow to go over what happened and what they're going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. I'm preparing for some stonewalling and bureaucratic weaseling, but we'll see what happens at the meeting.