A trucker found a 1-year-old boy alive on a Louisiana roadside after the child was abandoned amid storm Beryl, police say

By Jamiel Lynch, Colin Jeffery, Jason Hanna and Sharif Paget, CNN
4 minute read • Updated 8:28 AM EDT, Fri July 12, 2024



A ditch along Louisiana's I-10 near where the child was found. KADN

(CNN) — A truck driver found a 1-year-old alive in a ditch off an interstate highway in Louisiana this week, a day after the boy’s 4-year-old brother was found dead near the same freeway in what investigators think was a case of abandonment around the time tropical storm conditions hit the area, authorities said. ... The boys’ mother, a Louisiana resident, has been arrested in Mississippi and faces murder and other charges, accused of abandoning the children in Louisiana, authorities said Thursday.

A Louisiana sheriff, who says he believes the 1-year-old spent two days along Interstate 10, including while Hurricane Beryl or its weaker iterations battered the western Gulf Coast region with rain and strong wind – is praising the truck driver for seeing the child and stopping to pick up him up Tuesday. ... “We look at this 1-year-old as our miracle baby, (because) he was still alive,” Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Stitch Guillory said this week. “This kid spent two days out in the weather on the side of the highway. … Thank God that trucker (saw) him.”

An investigation began Monday afternoon, when the 4-year-old boy’s body was found floating in water behind a rest stop off I-10 in western Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish, just across the Texas state line, the sheriff’s office said. No cause of death was immediately announced.

{snip}