An off-duty Sanford Airport Police officer driving to work in the pre-dawn dark spotted something no commuter wants to see: a small child, completely alone, walking along a residential road in Deltona. Officer Chris Jaques pulled over near Lake Helen Osteen Road around 4:30 a.m. on the Saturday in late July and found a nonverbal 3-year-old girl, completely unclothed, wandering less than half a mile from her home.
Jaques picked the girl up and gave her a small towel to cover herself while he called it in to the Volusia Sheriff’s Office, according to WESH 2. The girl’s father had reported his three-year-old daughter, who has autism, missing, and a deputy arrived at the scene 22 minutes later while their body camera recorded the encounter. Jaques told the station he was worried about traffic and other roadway dangers while he waited, and that the girl appeared healthy despite the ordeal.
How She Got Out
Deputies checked the girl’s home and found no signs of neglect, and the girl’s mother told them her daughter likely escaped through a broken bedroom window panel. No arrests were made. The distinction matters under Florida law: state statute defines criminal child neglect as a caregiver’s willful failure to provide necessary supervision, a threshold that an accidental window escape does not meet without evidence of intentional disregard, according to the Florida Legislature.
Even so, the Volusia Sheriff’s Office sent a copy of its incident report to the Department of Children and Families, a step required regardless of fault. Under Florida’s Protection of Vulnerable Persons Act, anyone who knows or reasonably suspects child neglect must report it to the state’s central abuse hotline, per the Florida Department of Children and Families. The girl was reunited with her parents, and Jaques credited the Sheriff’s Office for responding in force.
A Second Rescue, Two Decades Apart
This was not the first time Jaques found a wandering toddler alone. About 20 years earlier, in 2006, he rescued a small child from the middle of Veterans Memorial Parkway in Volusia County and returned the toddler to their mother, WESH 2 reported. Jaques, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who has served with the Sanford Airport Police Department, has six children and 13 grandchildren of his own…