4-year-old found safe after getting off at wrong stop
By Correne Martin
Never tell your kids you’re calling the cops because they are being bad.
Those words of advice come straight from a parent who experienced his worst nightmare Wednesday, March 22, after school let out in Prairie du Chien.
Dwight Kussmaul was waiting for his two young daughters to get off the bus one block from their home, on Beaumont Road. His third-grade daughter arrived first and shared a frightening message: her younger sister, Jaelyn, a 4-year-old kindergartener, was missing.
“She said she wasn’t on the bus,” he recounted.
Because the B.A. Kennedy Elementary students board the bus before their Bluff View Intermediate counterparts, big sister was expecting Jaelyn to be on there. But she wasn’t.
Kussmaul immediately called the school, and staff said a teacher’s assistant had put her on the correct bus. The school then contacted the bus driver, who said, at that moment, Jaelyn was not on the bus. Southwest Bus Service was involved and requested all its buses stop and look for the young girl based on a description her dad had given. In the meantime, Kussmaul, who is a sheriff’s deputy with Crawford County, personally called the sheriff’s department, which radioed all city and county officers requesting them to be on the lookout.
School gets out at 3:36 p.m. and Jaelyn would have likely gotten off the bus between 3:45 and 3:55 p.m. The call to the sheriff’s office was made at 4:25 p.m.
“It was the worst feeling ever,” Kussmaul said of the experience.
In order to quickly notify citizens in the Prairie du Chien area of the missing girl, Crawford County Communications sent out a CodeRed alert to people in the city at 4:43 p.m.
“Keep in mind, both dispatchers were on the phone with parents, the school, Southwest Bus and city/county officers during the first part of this call getting facts and details prior to sending a public message,” 911 coordinator Julie Cipra said. “So it was sent out pretty fast to folks who might see her.”
As Kussmaul was on his phone talking to local officials, his wife and his family members, he was also searching for Jaelyn on the streets, alleys, parks and yards near his home.
Finally, not long after the CodeRed went out, a city police officer called Kussmaul to inform him Jaelyn had been found safe.
“He was driving through the alleys [one to two blocks from] our house and he spotted her,” Kussmaul stated. “She was actually walking toward him crying. Anytime she’s with me or her mom and she sees a cop car, she says, ‘Look, it’s one of your friends.’ So she knew to go to an officer.”
A CodeRed alert citing the child had been found safe was sent at 4:45 p.m., Cipra said.
“She was crying when we got to her. She was terrified when she got off and didn’t see her sister,” Kussmaul added. “She knew whereabouts she needed to go and wasn’t far from home. But she was all alone and she just got lost. We told her it was gonna be OK and that she was safe.”
From the time Jaelyn was considered missing to the time she was located, about one hour passed. But that hour felt like days to the Kussmaul family.
“It was awful. We’re just glad it was only an hour and everything is OK. It could’ve been worse,” her dad said. “I thought everybody was great. They were willing to drop what they were doing and help us find our daughter.”
Thankfully, the situation wasn’t tragic and nothing bad happened to Jaelyn. Kussmaul plans to talk to the administration about the possibility of implementing a system that might prevent something similar from happening to others.
Everyone involved ended up learning an extraordinary lesson from what happened Wednesday. The message Kussmaul wants parents and role models to take away is to teach kids that police officers are their friends and that they are here to help and make sure they are safe. Kids need to be able to rely on cops instead of being scared of them, he said.
The school district already brings officers into the classrooms to meet children and, for example, have lunch with them in small groups. Principal Laura Stuckey said the district teaches students about all emergency workers and their “importance in our lives.”
“Parents, please talk to your children about the role that law enforcement officers play. They are here to help us. This story gives an example of a young girl who has been taught just that by her mom and dad, and therefore was not afraid to go to a police officer for help when she was lost and scared,” Stuckey stated, in part, in a Facebook post. “We are so thankful that she was found safely.”
Kussmaul was just overwhelmed with gratitude and appreciation for those who helped look for and find his daughter.
“Any single employee on the city or sheriff’s department would stop what they were doing to help a kid,” he said. “You always hear people say the cops are out to get people. But they’re just doing their job and they’re good people.
We should never threaten our kids with that. Law enforcement officers are here for us when we need them.”
