Ouachita County Sheriff’s Office
There are times when so many bad things happen that even the most faithful may question their belief. And then there are times when the miraculous happens and its clear that God’s presence is the only thing that made it possible.
That is the case with two children in Arkansas. After they were in a car accident that tragically killed their mother, a toddler and a baby were found alive near and inside the car, after one of the children, believed to be about 3 was found wandering near the wreckage.
On Monday morning, the Ouachita County Sheriff’s Office was alerted to a young boy with scratches and cuts to his body who had been wandering alone beside a road in Camden, Arkansas. The officers immediately began an investigation to find out who the boy was, and where he came from.
“All we knew was that the boy had a whole bunch of scratches and scrapes from head to toe,” Nathan Greeley, a Lieutenant with Ouachita’s detective criminal investigation division, tells PEOPLE. “He looked like someone who had crawled through a bunch of thorns.”
Officers brought the toddler back to their headquarters and posted a photo of him to social media in the hopes someone would be able to identify him. As they waited, sheriffs at the station bathed the boy and replaced his soiled and dirty clothes.
“The parent instinct kicked in for all of us, we cared for him like he was our own child,” Greeley says. “He was very, very thirsty. He later colored and played with cars, but he wasn’t real vocal.”
A half-hour after the officers posted the picture to Facebook, family members reached out and identified the boy as 3-year-old Kylen Holliman, who had been missing for days along with his mother, Lisa Holliman, and 1-year-old brother. The last time the family had heard from Lisa, they said, was Thursday or Friday of last week.
“All I can say is, in the 11 years that I’ve been here, I have never seen something so tragic and amazing at the same time,” Greeley says. “It’s tragic for the loss of the mother, but it’s nothing short of a miracle that the boy was able to escape. At the end of the day, that boy is the hero who saved his brother.”
READ MORE STORIES ON BLACKAMERICAWEB.COM:
- WHM Spotlight: Wanda Cooper-Jones Talks Continuing Her Son’s Legacy With The Ahmaud Arbery Foundation
- Louis Gossett Jr., 1st Black man to win supporting actor Oscar, dies at 87
- Kemetologist Tony Browder & Dr. Walter Williams l The Carl Nelson Show
SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER: