SWAT's Season 8 Premiere Feels Eerily Close To This Horrific Real-Life Kidnapping

Contains spoilers for "S.W.A.T" Season 8, Episode 1 — "Vanished"

Hondo (Shemar Moore) and the rest of the "S.W.A.T" team have their hands full as the squad returns for Season 8 after being cancelled and then revived once again. In the season premiere, a group of impoverished children and their bus driver are kidnapped by a group of unknown assailants, and the team must work backwards, using what they know about the kids to figure out where they are. For Hondo, the matter becomes more urgent when the man driving the bus turns out to be Coach Howie Kincaid (William Allen Young), the man who happened to run the athletics program that eventually straightened out a much more youthful Hondo back in the day.

Ties to Yemen and the banking work of one of the kid's parents end up providing the team with the answers they need, but new squad member Devin Gamble (Annie Ilonzeh) is forced to cope with the team's accusations, as she has familial ties to criminal organizations. In the end, everything turns out fine for the team and the hostages alike — as it did for the victims of a real-life kidnapping that shares some similarities to this episode's story.

In 1976, a group of schoolchildren and their driver were held for ransom in the Chowchilla bus kidnapping. This real-life crime, which carries some clear parallels to the events of "Vanished," saw the victims abducted and held underground before they managed to forge their own daring escape.

On July 15, 1976, a group of three masked assailants kidnapped 26 schoolchildren and their bus driver, Ed Ray. Aged 5 to 14, the children were taken to a rural location, where the bus was abandoned. Driven to a new location via two vans, they were placed in an abandoned trailer truck buried twelve feet underground in a rock quarry located in Livermore, California. There, they were left to bake in roasting hot, unsafe conditions with no bathroom facilities and just a small amount of rations.

With the ceiling above them in danger of caving in, Michael Marshall, then 14, came up with a plan to climb to freedom. Marshall and Ray worked together to move the manhole cover that was blocking the entryway to the tunnel above them. 28 hours of digging later, Marshall reached the surface, and together, he and Ray hoisted the rest of the children to safety. They then walked together until they stumbled upon quarry workers, who contacted authorities.

Frederick Newhall Woods, James Schoenfeld, and his brother Richard were later accused of perpetrating the crime. Newhall Woods' father owned the quarry in question, and all three men came from well-to-do families, so the crime — which was supposed to culminate in a $5 million ransom paid to the threesome — was particularly shocking. Ironically, they failed to call in their ransom request because the Chowchilla police tip line had been completely overwhelmed with calls. In the end, all three men were sentenced to life with the possibility of parole. Richard Schoenfeld was freed in 2012, his brother James in 2015, and Newhall Woods in 2018. The crime, however, left behind emotional scars on many of the kids, scars that no fiction can ever undo.