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[stormiestl]

An Amazing Story of a Six Year old Who led 6 todlers to safety.

WLEX-TV

In
the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard in New Orleans last Thursday, one
group of survivors stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road,
holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him
around as if he were their leader.

They
were holding hands. Three of the children were about two years old, and
one was wearing only diapers. A three-year-old girl, who wore colorful
barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in
tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his
name was Deamonte Love.

Thousands
of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but
few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found
wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New
Orleans. In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation,
paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined
them stayed up that night, brooding.

Transporting
the children alone was "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life,
knowing that their parents are either dead" or that they had been
abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who
put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New
Orleans.

"It goes back to the same thing," he said. "How did a 6-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?"

So
far, parents displaced by flooding have reported 220 children missing,
but that number is expected to rise, said Mike Kenner of the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which will help reunite
families. With crowds churning at evacuation points, many children were
parted from their parents accidentally; one woman handed her baby up
onto a bus, turned around to pick up her suitcase and turned back to
find that the bus had left.

At
the rescue headquarters, a cool tile-floored building swarming with
firefighters and paramedics, the children ate cafeteria food and fell
into a deep sleep. Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics. He said
his father was tall and his mother was short. He gave his address, his
phone number and the name of his elementary school.

He
said the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others
were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his
apartment building.

The
children were clean and healthy -- downright plump in the case of the
infant, said Joyce Miller, a nurse who examined them. It was clear, she
said, that "time had been taken with those kids." The baby was "fat and
happy."

"This baby child was terrified," he said. "After she relaxed, it was gobble, gobble, gobble."

As
grim dispatches came in from the field, one woman in the office burst
into tears at the thought that the children had been abandoned in New
Orleans, said Sharon Howard, assistant secretary of the office of
public health.

Late
the same night, they got an encouraging report: A woman in a shelter in
Thibodeaux was searching for seven children. People in the building
started clapping at the news. But when they got the mother on the
phone, it became clear that she was looking for a different group of
seven children, Howard said.

"What that made me understand was that this was happening across the state," she said. "That kind of frightened me."

The
children were transferred to a shelter operated by the Department of
Social Services, rooms full of toys and cribs where mentors from the
Big Buddy Program were on hand day and night. For the next two days,
the staff did detective work.

Deamonte
began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big
Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the
helicopter. How he promised her he'd take care of his little brother.

Late
Saturday night, they found Deamonte's mother, who was in a shelter in
San Antonio along with the four mothers of the other five children.
Catrina Williams, 26, saw her children's pictures on a web site set up
over the weekend by the National Center for Missing and Exploited
Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight was waiting to
take the children to Texas.

In
a phone interview, Williams said she is the kind of mother who doesn't
let her children out of her sight. What happened the Thursday after the
hurricane, she said, was that her family, trapped in an apartment
building on the 3200 block of Third Street in New Orleans, began to
feel desperate.

The
water wasn't going down and they had been living without light, food or
air conditioning for four days. The baby needed milk and the milk was
gone. So she decided they would evacuate by helicopter. When a
helicopter arrived to pick them up they were told to send the children
first and that the helicopter would be back in 25 minutes. She and her
neighbors had to make a quick decision.

It was a wrenching moment. Williams' father, Adrian Love, told her to send the children ahead.

"I
told them to go ahead and give them up, because me, I would give my
life for my kids. They should feel the same way," said Love, 48. "They
were shedding tears. I said, Let the babies go.' "

His daughter and her friends followed his advice.

"We did what we had to do for our kids, because we love them," Williams said.

The
helicopter didn't come back. While the children were transported to
Baton Rouge, their parents wound up in Texas, and although Williams was
reassured that they would be reunited, days passed without any contact.
On Sunday, she was elated.

"All I know is I just want to see my kids," she said. "Everything else will just fall into place."

At
3 p.m. Sunday, DSS workers said good-by to seven children who now had
names: Deamonte Love; Darynael Love; Zoria Love and her brother Tyreek.
The girl who cried "Gabby!" was Gabrielle Janae Alexander. The girl
they called Peanut was Degahney Carter. And the boy whom they called G
was actually Lee -- Leewood Moore Jr.

The
children were strapped into car seats and driven to an airport, where
they were flown to San Antonio to rejoin their parents. As they loaded
into the van, the shelter workers looked in the windows; some wept.

The
baby gaped with delight in the front seat. Deamonte was hanging onto
Robertson's neck so desperately that Robertson decided, at the last
minute, to ride with him as far as Lafayette.

Shelter
worker Kori Thomas, held Zoria, 3, who reached out to smooth her
eyebrows. Tyreek put a single fat finger on the van window by way of
goodbye.

Robertson
said he doubted the children would remember much of the helicopter
evacuation, the Causeway, the sweltering heat or the smell of the
flooded city.

"I think what's going to stick with them is that they survived Hurricane Katrina," he said. "And that they were loved."