COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Richland County Sheriff’s Department has identified the Fort Jackson soldier accused of hijacking a school bus Thursday.
Sheriff Leon Lott said 23-year-old Jovan Collazo of New Jersey will be charged with 19 counts of kidnapping, armed robbery, carjacking, pointing and presenting a firearm, and other offenses.
Collazo ran away from his unit on the army installation in the morning and began trying to get rides from cars on Interstate 77, authorities said.
He walked to Percival Road, where he boarded the bus with 18 children going to Forest Lake Elementary, Lott said at a news conference. Armed with a rifle, the recruit told the bus driver to drive him to the next town, Lott said, but then made the driver and the kids get off the bus. He then drove the bus himself a few miles up the road.
Deputies arrested the soldier near the intersection of Alpine and Percival roads. The students and the driver were not physically injured.
Collazo is jailed at Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center awaiting a bond hearing.
Fort Jackson is the nation’s largest military basic training base with more than 50,000 recruits assigned there each year,
A Fort Jackson spokesperson said Collazo was an Army “trainee.”
“This was a failure in our accountability procedures that we truly regret and are apologetic to our community,” the base spokesperson said in a statement. “We are thankful for the fast actions of RCSD and the local community to assist in the apprehension of the individual.”
Lott praised the children and the bus driver’s training, which allowed him to remain calm and deal with the situation. Lott called the bus driver a “hero.”
“They are upset. They were scared to death,” Lott said of the children. “It was six minutes. Six minutes they were traumatized. Six complete minutes the bad guy was on the bus with a gun. But they were not hysterical. They did what they were trained to do. And I think that all contributed to them having a successful result in what happened this morning.”
While Callazo was allegedly hijacking the bus, the children kept asking questions of him.
“The kids were asking questions. ‘Are you a soldier?’ ‘Are you going to hurt us?’ ‘Are you going to hurt the bus driver?’ They were being kids and they were asking lots of questions,” Lott said.
Richland 2 School District thanked police in a statement.
“Once we were certain all students were accounted for and physically safe, we immediately began deploying social and emotional counseling resources to the school so that our students could begin the process of healing as they are dealing with a traumatic event,” Superintendent Baron Davis said in the statement. “We will continue to provide counseling services for the students and their families, our bus driver and employees as long as necessary. We will also cooperate fully with law enforcement as they investigate this incident.”
