Photo by Keith Stewart
Sullivan school administrators and staff leave the high school Tuesday morning and head north on Main Street in search of a female student who had gone missing around 10 a.m. The student was later found safe by a resident volunteering in the search effort.

Found within two hours by local resident

by Keith Stewart
keith@newsprogress.com

A female student at Sullivan Elementary School went missing briefly Tuesday morning before being found on the west end of town.

According to Sullivan police chief John Love, the approximately 10-year old girl was originally seen running out the east doors of the school around 10 a.m. Tuesday. Sullivan PD were then contacted by the school to help in locating the child. Officer Andrew Pistorious was then dispatched. The girl’s father, who lives near the school, was contacted by both Pistorious and Sullivan superintendent Brad Tuttle. Love then notified all city utility workers, providing a description of the girl, in the event they came across a similar child.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.

Sullivan Fire Department chief Mike Piper then offered his department’s services, and before long, a large search group had gathered at Sullivan High School around 10:30 a.m. to come up with a search plan.

“I was really impressed with the amount of people and how everything came together,” Tuttle explained.

Love says his department had been told the girl was known as a “walker”, thus prompting a call to the county sheriff’s department for help in searching nearby county roads.

Because the girl had been last seen exiting to the east, the search effort immediately focused on Wyman and Tabor parks but extended to local churches, railroads, and restaurants.

While a dozen or more school and emergency personnel scattered about in search of the girl, private residents contacted the police department, they too offering their help in the search.

Sullivan resident Gene Booker was in the police department at the time of the ongoing search when he, too, decided to volunteer.

While Booker was gone, another resident called in to report that a child had been seen running between houses on the north side of town and that a pair of children’s shoes had also been found.

Booker then returned a few minutes later with a small girl with no shoes. Love then did a thorough cross-check to make sure it was the missing girl before finally calling off the search at around 11:30 a.m.

Booker had found the girl near the railroad tracks on Fuller Street, just under a mile away from the school. Love says he credits the success of the search with the generous and quick response of school and emergency personnel as well as members of the public.

“It goes to show how people here react in emergency situations,” said Love. “The more people you have out looking the better your chances at finding someone before the wrong person does.”

“I’m just impressed with how quickly they got everything together,” explained Tuttle, who handled the situation from the school standpoint since SES principal Rita Florey was out of the office. “The different agencies worked together really well.”

Tuttle explained that staff managed to see the “older” student exit the east wing doors via a video feed but was not picked up on any of the exterior cameras.

“We let the police department know pretty quickly that we had a child missing,” Tuttle said. “We had about 10 staffers out searching for her.”

When asked about whether the district could prevent another similar incident from occurring, Tuttle, in more words, explained no.

“The safety of schools is a big concern,” he said. “[But]you have no one monitoring that door along with many doors in the high school and many in the middle school. They’re locked from the outside but not from the inside because of the fire code…when a student leaves school without checking out through the office, there are consequences, and [she] did not leave in the proper way.”