Community effort saves the day for 7-year-old

IN A heart warming display of unity and community spirit, a seven-year-old girl who went missing after school on Wednesday has been found safe and sound.

Summer Charters, a student of the Kingstown Preparatory School, was discovered by a search party in a temporary structure at Arnos Vale around 1 o’clock on Thursday morning.

The alarm was raised when the Kingstown Preparatory School posted on their Facebook page that a Grade 2 student had not returned home that day, expressing their concern for the missing child. Summer was last seen shortly after 4 p.m. on Wednesday at the bus stop near Girls’ High School.

SUMMER CHARTERS

Director of the National Commission of Crime Prevention, Rodney Small has commended the Vincentian community for its remarkable effort in locating Summer and emphasized the importance of love and compassion among the people.

Small said upon seeing social media posts and flyers about Summer being missing, he took to his social media page to rally individuals together to form a search party. The response was swift, with calls and messages pouring in in less than five minutes from concerned members of the community.

The search effort began in Arnos Vale, in the area of the ‘Technical College’ around 11 pm and gained the support and guidance of the police, area representative Fitz Bramble, friends of Rodney, and family members of Summer.

Bramble, in a call to Hot 97.1 FM on Wednesday said that area was chosen to start the search because Summer lives nearby with her father in the Arnos Vale ‘plan’ housing area.

“Apparently she takes a van to and from school on a daily basis. [On Wednesday] she had Brownies, after school, and the regular van that she takes, took her home around 4:30 and dropped her off by the gap where she walks to go home. We were informed that she … thought that she had lost her water bottle, so she caught another van to back to Prep School to look for her water bottle,” Bramble shared.

The East Kingstown representative said he was told that the security guard at the school told Summer that the school was already closed so she would have to retrieve the water bottle the next day.

The van that took her back to the school dropped her back to the spot in Arnos Vale where she usually comes off to go home.

Small said: “So we all formed in a group … just to see how we can craft a way forward … obviously the police were guiding us carefully and there was a particular home owner in the area who had some cameras and we were looking at the footage to really see what sort of information we could gather form the footage.”

Violinist Darron Andrews, who was part of the group, suggested a group prayer during the search, adding a spiritual dimension to the community’s efforts. Small shared that the search team was confident that they would find Summer, even though they had no set plan, and so relied on video footage to guide their search.

“I got a message from somebody who said they saw someone like the child in a particular area, so when we were walking towards that area as an entire group, one of the ladies called me and say it seems as though they saw something on the footage.”

Small said after receiving that message, the group of about 20 persons went back to where they had started.

At that time, the police had left the scene to investigate another incident in the area.

“They came back and they went and they looked at the footage and that last piece of footage that they saw, that’s when they saw Summer.”

Bramble, on radio, said the footage reportedly showed that after Summer got off the second van, she started walking up the side road heading to her father’s house.

“The footage also shows that she turned back and came back on the main road and started walking towards the ‘Prime Lime’ area of Arnos Vale, then turned right in the direction of the ‘Technical College’.”

Small said now that they knew the direction in which Summer had gone, the team decided to follow that same route.

“While doing that, I was on the phone with [Assistant Commissioner of Police Christopher Benjamin] who was guiding me in terms of helping me to co-ordinate what we do as a group, and I remember vividly, he said to me … to see if there were any abandoned buildings … in the particular area and get the police to go with you and search.”

After receiving the guidance from Benjamin, Small told the group to search any abandoned structures in the area.

According to Small, a member of the search party, Sophia Grant, heard something and rushed toward a makeshift structure near the entrance to the ‘Technical College’.

There, they found Summer, who, according to Small, appeared as though she had been sleeping.

The police quickly arrived, questioned Summer, took her to the hospital for checks and later to the Criminal Investigations Department.

Small has expressed his gratitude for the overwhelming community support in the search
for Summer, underscoring the need for increased community development, bonding, and shared values.