Yesterday I learned the true definition of community

Yesterday morning when I woke up, I saw a Facebook post from the Bandera County Sheriff’s Office. A kid had been missing since supper the night before.

They had several law enforcement agencies searching for a 5-year-old child that had vanished while walking a short distance from an RV on their property to their house. He was wearing a neon green T-shirt and boots and it was cold.

The sheriff’s office stated that they weren’t asking for volunteers to help yet because they had dogs searching for him and they didn’t want to contaminate the scene, but that they may ask the community to come out and search at some point.

I have always stepped up for kids in this community and I personally believe in my core that it is the most important thing that we can do as human beings. Being a parent of five children myself, I know how sacred children are.

Whether it’s children who have been left in hot cars, children who were killed or injured by drunk drivers or abusive parents, or missing children, I go into another mode and the kids become my number 1 priority. It’s automatic. While it’s been heartbreaking at times, I thank God for giving me this quality.

At about 8:30 AM, the Sheriff’s Office was still unable to find this kid, who lived on a ranch with rocky, cedar-covered terrain that was thousands of acres in the thickest of the Texas Hill Country.

They asked the public for help. I was on-air doing my radio show and called out to the community for help to come to find this kid. I also put Facebook posts out to about 90,000 followers for people to come help.

At about 9 AM I left my morning show and left my sidekick, Radkowski in control of the show. One reason that I really love working for JAM Broadcasting is that their core values align with mine.

Justin McClure, one of the owners of JAM Broadcasting, and his wife Leslee caught wind of what I was doing, and instead of saying, “No, you have to stay on the air.” They both said, “We will meet you there.” They quit their on-air shows and immediately went to help find this kid as well.

I went home and got my steel-toe Ariat boots and drove as fast as I could to the site. I repeated over and over on the way there, “I am so happy and grateful that they found this kid alive and that he is safe.” I probably said it over 100 times. There’s a reason that I do this and I’ll talk about it in future blog posts. I also prayed like I hadn’t in a long time.

I pulled up and got out of the truck and saw my friend, Sue Calberg from KENS 5 there, who was also emotional about this. We all had a mission that trumped everything else.

I arrived and shortly after, Justin and Leslee arrived. There were about 100 other people standing in the cold in 40-degree weather, waiting to search. My Podcast partner, John Barrera then showed up as I can always count on him to do the right thing. His core values align with mine as well.

Then I started seeing other people that I knew show up. None of the people there cared about anything else other than finding a kid that most of them didn’t even know. They had dropped everything to find this missing kid.

There were numerous times that groups of people would start praying that we found this kid safely. People were walking up with boxes of donuts and cases of water. There was a fire but nobody was even really standing around it trying to get warm. All they cared about was finding this kid.

Several volunteer fire departments were on the scene. Texas DPS had a helicopter flying overhead. People were driving up with trailers with horses inside. There were vehicles flooding the fields parked and lined up and down the road by the property.

I have never seen anything like this in my life. It was like something straight out of a movie.

Here was a 5-year-old kid, missing for over 16 hours at this point. He was last seen in a T-shirt and we all knew he had to be cold. We didn’t know if he was dead or alive. We didn’t know if he had fallen in a creek or body of water. We did know that we were going to search every inch of that property to find him though and hoped for the best.

The sheriff’s office finally lined us up along a fence, 10-feet-apart. We would all attempt to walk in a straight line toward the back of the huge property, though cedar trees and rocky terrain would keep that from happening.

I saw men, women, and even children climbing through the roughest of areas looking everywhere for this kid getting cut up by thorn bushes and cedar trees, sliding down hills, climbing up hills, and finding energy that most of us didn’t even know we had.

After about 45 minutes of searching this property, I heard John Barrera yell that they had found the kid. He didn’t know anything else, other than that the kid had been found.

We were all down in the bottom of a ravine at this point, at least a half-mile from where we started. A group of us waited for a few minutes, trying to get more information as we saw the DPS helicopter fly back toward the front of the property and hover, facing us.

While we were searching, a rancher had found the kid and he and the kid waved at the helicopter and they landed and picked him up. This kid survived 17 and a half hours out in the cold by this point in a T-shirt and wet clothes.

Then about 10 of us walked as a group back to the front of the property and saw that the helicopter had landed. The kid was alive and well and in the back of an EMS vehicle at this point. He had survived and was cold and wet from crossing a creek earlier at some point.

Then I saw one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen in my life. There were hundreds of people there by this point. From firefighters to sheriff deputies, to searchers, to the local news, it was like something out of a real-life movie, happening right in front of our eyes.

We saw a first responder carry this kid that we had all been frantically searching for being carried to the helicopter alive. The crowd cheered and roared. We then saw the kid sitting up in the helicopter in the neon green shirt that the sheriff’s office said that he was wearing when he went missing.

Being in the media business myself and covering hundreds of situations over the years, this is something that we rarely get. We rarely get a happy ending. This was one of the happiest moments of my life. It made everything we do worth it.

I love the Texas Hill Country. While the terrain is beautiful, so are the people and this is why I am proud to call it my home. God Bless.