A young teen who left her home during the night and whose parents couldn’t find her was rescued by Putnam County Sheriff’s Office and Putnam County EMS and taken to an Atlanta children’s hospital.
Putnam County Sheriff’s Office received a call from some Putnam County parents who said their 14-year-old daughter had left home in the middle of the night Saturday, June 8, and could not be found.
Sheriff Howard Sills said they began their search “doing the things we normally do with a missing child,” and contacted the girl’s friend, but she was not at the friend’s house.
So, they went to the girl’s hangout spot at Little River. There, Sgt. Justin Brock found the girl’s bookbag on a big rock.
“We then became concerned because there was a goodbye note in the bag,” Sills said. “The way it was worded, we couldn’t discern if it was suicide or just ‘I’m leaving.’” Sills said he knew the girl had not actually been at the rock where her bag was found because the foliage around the rock had not been disturbed.
“So, I knew she had taken the bookbag and thrown it off the bridge,” he said. “And I knew she hadn’t jumped off the bridge because the water is so shallow and rocky right there, and she was nowhere to be seen.”
Meanwhile, a man stopped by and told one of the deputies that he had been there earlier and had seen a young girl out there. The man said she ran off into the woods when the girl saw him.
So, Sills called in his K9 officer and handler. While he was waiting, Sills said he also called the school system’s safety director to learn of other known friends or classmates of the middle schooler.
While he was doing that, the sheriff’s office received a phone call from a Horton Drive resident who said a girl was running through their backyard. So, the searchers went to that location.
“And we found her on the riverbank,” Sills said. “She had fallen down in there and was upside down with her head against a tree. She was breathing and had a good pulse, but we called EMS.”
Fearing a head injury because they couldn’t get the young teen to respond to them, the EMTs requested a medical helicopter, which flew her to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta – Egleston Hospital.
The girl, whose name was withheld by authorities, had been missing for approximately 10 hours when she was found. She remained in the intensive care unit at Egleston for a day, but was moved to a private room on Monday, Sills said.