Could Pablo’s Experience Change How Schools Protect Children Who May Wander?

 A South Texas mother says she arrived at her children’s school only to discover that her first-grader with autism had gotten outside without an adult beside him. Moriama Martinez says she learned what happened after missing a call from the school earlier. Her son, Pablo, was safe, but the discovery left her confronting a question no parent wants to face: how did he get out?

Pablo attends Ted Flores Elementary School in Pearsall, Texas, and Moriama says he has been diagnosed with Level 2 autism. According to his mother, the school called her Monday afternoon, but she missed the call and returned it two minutes later. She says she remained on hold for more than 10 minutes before hanging up, and nobody called her again. Later, when she arrived to pick up her children, she noticed Pablo’s backpack in the school office.

That backpack became the first clue that something was wrong. Moriama says she was then told that Pablo had “eloped,” a term used when a child unexpectedly leaves a supervised area and gets outside. The following day, she returned to the school to watch surveillance footage. The video she was shown allegedly captured Pablo running down a first-grade hallway before passing through doors that led outside, raising concerns about how long he had been without supervision.

Moriama says she counted approximately 23 seconds before a teacher appeared on the camera. Based on the portions of surveillance footage she was shown, she estimates Pablo ultimately had roughly a 43-second head start. Those numbers may sound brief, but for a child who has left a school building, a matter of seconds can create frightening possibilities for a parent. Thankfully, in those moments, Pablo was eventually found safe, allowing his family to bring him home.

The relief of knowing her son was safe, however, did not erase Moriama’s fear about what might have happened. She said she had trusted the school to care for her children, and the experience left her feeling betrayed. “I could’ve been coming home to an empty room every day because I put trust in my children’s school,” she told me. “Never again. It’s betrayal.” Her words reflect the emotional weight of discovering a child was outside and alone.

The incident also reminded Moriama of another account involving Ted Flores Elementary shared last year. In April 2025, the grandmother of another autistic child at the school said her four-year-old, nonverbal grandson got beyond the school fence, crossed a parking lot and headed toward a residential street. According to that family’s account, a truck missed the boy “by seconds.” More than a year later, Moriama says her own autistic son also made it outside the school.

For Moriama, the issue reaches beyond one frightening afternoon and centers on something parents place enormous value in: trust. Families leave their children at school believing adults will supervise them until pickup, and parents of children who may wander or run can face intense fear when that supervision appears to fail. Moriama emphasized that parents know their own children deeply, telling me, “No one cares about your children like you do.” That belief now shapes the warning she wants other families to hear.

Pablo was found safe, and that is the outcome his family can hold onto after an alarming discovery. Yet Moriama’s experience has left her questioning the trust she placed in the school and urging other parents, those raising children with special needs, to remain attentive to what happens at school. For her family, the incident became a lasting reminder of how quickly a child can move beyond a supervised school space.