Tilwonna Gollman-Stevenson knows her passengers. She knows when they get on, when they get off, and who may need a little more time to board. So when an unfamiliar elderly woman boarded the 55 bus from Rockville to Germantown Monday evening, she took notice.

“I wanted to keep her calm,” said Gollman-Stevenson, who has been a Ride On bus operator for five years. “I wanted her to know that she was OK and that help was coming.”

After Ride On Central Communications sent out an alert to buses in the Germantown region about a missing woman with dementia, Gollman-Stevenson realized — though not immediately — that the woman was on her bus, sitting not far behind her. She pulled over, reassuring puzzled passengers as she waited for police.

“Thanks to her quick thinking and calm presence, what began as a frightening situation ended in the safe recovery and reunion of the individual with their family,” Ride On wrote in a press release.

There are about 370 buses in Montgomery County, and more than twice that number of drivers, according to Ride On staff. Emily DeTitta, a spokesperson for the county’s transportation department, said incidents like these happen fairly often.

“You don’t really hear about bus operators doing these amazing things, but they really do on the daily,” DeTitta said.

A near miss

At first, Gollman-Stevenson didn’t realize that the unfamiliar passenger was the same person police were looking for.

The woman had boarded at the Lakeforest Transit Center in Gaithersburg at around 8:30 p.m., Gollman-Stevenson said. About 10 minutes later, and after Ride On had issued the alert, police pulled the bus over to ask Gollman-Stevenson if she had seen a “Caucasion woman in a gray T-shirt and a black skirt.”

The description did not exactly match the octogenarian seated near her. And Gollman-Stevenson had been picturing a young woman.

The police left. And then it clicked.

“When I thought about it, and I looked at her, I said, ‘Hold up, her shirt is gray,’” Gollman-Stevenson said.

She called the central station and pulled over by a Walmart near the end of her route to wait for police. One passenger, resenting the delay, began pointing at the missing woman, who didn’t speak English. Gollman-Stevenson asked him to “please get your hand out of her face.”

“I let everybody on the bus know, ‘I apologize, but we have to wait. Her family’s looking for her,’” the driver said.

The woman seemed to realize she had a friend in Gollman-Stevenson. She put her hand over the bus driver’s and smiled.

Gollman-Stevenson said she treated the woman the way she would want someone to treat her own grandmother, who is 82 and often catches the bus in D.C.

“I imagine if she got lost or turned around, and if she was scared, who would give that attention?” she said. ”Who would take the time to care enough?”

When police arrived, the woman hesitated to follow them. Gollman-Stevenson reassured her that the police would take her back to her family.

‘That is just who she is’

LaTika Ochieng, Gollman-Stevenson’s supervisor, was unsurprised by her empolyee’s calm reaction to the situation.

“This is just who she is,” she said.

Gollman-Stevenson comes from a family of drivers — her father drove dump trucks and her aunt drove tractor trailers. She herself used to manage a Goodwill store, but decided she might like to drive for a living too.

“It’s better to be out on the road,” her father would tell her. “You get to see people, you get to experience life.”

What she loves most about driving is the freedom and the peace of mind that it brings, which she says is similar to going on a walk or jogging.

“You just can’t go too far in thought or you’ll start missing stops.”

Gollman-Stevenson said the woman survived on her busiest and most hectic bus, and seemed to understand, even when she was coaxed to leave, that she remained in good hands.

“I’m happy ... that she was okay, that she felt comfortable, that she trusted that it was safe.”