Happy ending for seven children, but thousands still missing

By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
September 8, 2005

Hurricane rescuers found seven children wandering together at an evacuation point in central New Orleans.

The oldest, a six-year-old boy, appeared to be their leader. He carried a five-month-old in his arms, followed by five infants. All were holding hands.

The children's desperate parents had handed them up to a rescue helicopter after four days spent trapped in their flooded home without food or light and no milk for the baby.

The crew who took the terrified children at the weekend promised to be back to collect the parents in 25 minutes. They did not return.

Thousands of children have been reported missing by displaced parents. Snapshots of their smiling faces are posted on websites with urgent appeals for information, with pictures of rescued children who have no idea where their parents are.

Three of the group of seven were about two years old, one wore only a nappy. A three-year-old girl led her 14-month-old brother by the hand.

At the Baton Rouge shelter where the children were taken, relief workers distracted the children with toys and began to coax information from them.

Pat Coveney, a Houston ambulance driver who drove the children out of New Orleans, described taking them out alone as "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life", knowing that their parents are either dead or that they had been abandoned.

Medical examinations showed the children were well cared for and healthy. After eating at the rescue headquarters, they fell asleep as staff tried to fathom how they came to be alone.

The six-year-old told paramedics that his name was Deamonte Love. He described his parents and gave them the name of his school and telephone number. His five-month-old brother's name was Darynael, he said, and two of the other children were his cousins - Tyreek and Zoria Love. The other three lived in the same building as him.

That evening a report was received that a woman in a shelter south-west of New Orleans was looking for seven children. But it turned out to be a different group, alarming rescue workers who began to realise how widespread the problem could be.

Six days after the hurricane, Deamonte's mother was found in a shelter in San Antonio, Texas, with the four mothers of the other five children, and on Sunday the children were flown to Texas for an emotional reunion.

Reports from parents of missing children are flooding in, said Mike Kenner, at the Department of Social Services shelter.

In one case, a woman handed her baby up on to a bus only to turn back for her suitcase and find the bus already gone.

Telegraph, London

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