A “miracle baby” survived two days in a ditch during Hurricane Beryl before a passing truck diver spotted the one-year-old crawling on a roadside. The baby was found near where it’s 4-year-old brother who was found deceased earlier that day, according to a Louisiana sheriff. Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Gary “Stitch” Guillory told reporters that the baby was miraculously unscathed other than having a few bug bites. “We look at this 1-year-old as our miracle baby because he was still alive,” Guillory said. “This kid spent two days out in the weather on the side of the highway. Thank God that trucker seen him.”
At the time, authorities had been searching for the infant after they found the body of his 4-year-old brother floating in a lake nearby, right outside of the Texas state line. The 4-year-old’s cause of death has yet to be announced pending the autopsy results. Investigators learned that the two children was last seen with their mother, Aliyah Jack, 25. Their mother was arrested initially on suspicion of failing to report a missing child in Meridian, Mississippi, over 350 miles from where her children were found. According to police, she faces murder charges as well as other charges including child abandonment and neglect.
The truck driver, Reginald Walton, who found the missing infant spoke with the local news outlet, KADN, where he recalled seeing the child in the embankment, initially thinking it was a doll that someone had tossed out of a vehicle. “But as I was passing by, I saw it move, and I say, ‘Hey, that looks like a baby,’” Walton, of Texas, told KADN. He stopped his truck, called 911, and ran back to where he saw the child. “Sure enough, there was a little boy sitting down the embankment there. As I approached him, he smiled at me, and then he stood up and started crying and walked toward me,” Walton said. The truck driver says he does not feel like a hero. “I just feel it was God’s will for me to be in the right place at the right time,” he said.