An eight-year-old girl survived for more than seven hours buried under rubble in a recycling bin at a landfill site after being kidnapped from her home in Florida, raped and left to die.
The girl was rescued when a police officer searching the tip spotted her hand poking through large chunks of concrete inside the bin where she had been dumped. Rescuers feared the girl was dead until another officer saw her finger moving.
”Everybody jumped in and started taking the rocks off her,” said Sergeant Mike Hall of Lake Worth police, the officer who found her. ”You always assume the worst, but she was in a lot better condition than we thought she’d be in. For her to endure what she did and live for more than seven hours in the recycling bin says a lot for her.”
”That we found this girl alive is a miracle,” said William Smith, the police chief at Lake Worth. ”When a child is abducted and abandoned like this, the critical thing is time. We had some luck and a lot of good police work.”
The girl was recovering in hospital last night while a 17-year-old who lives in the same house in Lantana appeared in court charged with attempted murder, false imprisonment and sexual battery of a child.
Police said that the teenager, who has been staying with the family since being thrown out of his aunt’s house four months ago, claimed the girl had been snatched in the middle of the night by two men in a pick-up truck.
”I can’t believe he went through all that knowing that the little girl was alive out there,” said the girl’s godmother.
More than 100 officers joined the search and the child was found less than a quarter of a mile from her home at 10.30am on Sunday. The godmother said the girl had told her she knew she would be rescued.
The suspect, who has been charged as an adult, could face life in jail if convicted. The girl’s natural mother said: ”If I could get my hands around his neck, he’d be dead. He left my daughter to die.”
Investigators said it was clear that her attacker did not expect her to be found alive. ”He intended to leave her there, and she wasn’t going to get out of the situation,” said FBI Special Agent Mike Driscoll. ”She was in a position that you wouldn’t think anyone could survive.”
The girl, whose name has not been released for legal reasons, was able to speak to her rescuers and identified her abductor while she was still lying in the dumpster, Hall said. She was taken to St Mary’s Medical Centre in West Palm Beach with cuts and bruises, and was last night in a ”good” condition. – Guardian Unlimited Â