A 1-year-old boy survived two days and nights by himself being battered by stormy weather on the side of a Louisiana highway until a trucker spotted him crawling along the roadway not far from where his 4-year-old brother was found dead a day earlier.
The baby was riddled with bug bites but otherwise unharmed. The boys’ mother, Aaliyah Jack, 25, was arrested on Tuesday in Mississippi, some 350 miles from where the children were found, authorities said.
“We look at this 1-year-old as our miracle baby because he was still alive,” Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Gary “Stitch” Guillory told reporters at a news conference in Lake Charles, about 200 miles west of New Orleans.
“This kid spent two days out in the weather on the side of the highway,” the sheriff said, emotion visibly registering on his face.
“Thank God that trucker seen him.”
Amid high winds and rainfall kicked up by Hurricane Beryl, the 4-year-old’s body was found in a lake behind a welcome center on Interstate 10 on Monday, not far from the Texas border. Autopsy reports for the boy are still pending, according to KPLC TV.
Authorities who were looking into the child’s death became aware that he was last seen on Saturday with Jack and the 1-year-old. Police were gearing up to search the lake for the baby, fearing he had met the same fate as his brother, when the trucker saw the baby and called 911.
A law enforcement alert was put out for Jack on Monday night, and a judge in Louisiana issued a warrant for her arrest. She was arrested in Meridian, Miss., currently on charges of failure to report a missing child.
“She was located in Mississippi, without the 1 year old, by the Meridian Police Department and taken into custody,” the Calcasieu Sheriff’s Office said.
“When deputies arrived, they were able to positively identify the child as the missing 1 year old,” the sheriff’s office said in a press release.
She will be extradited to Louisiana and held under a $300,000 bond, Guillory said.
It was not immediately clear if Jack had retained a lawyer.
