An off-duty Sanford Airport Police officer driving to work in the pre-dawn dark spotted something no commuter wants to see: a small child, completely alone, walking along a residential road in Deltona. Officer Chris Jaques pulled over near Lake Helen Osteen Road around 4:30 a.m. on the Saturday in late July and found a nonverbal 3-year-old girl, completely unclothed, wandering less than half a mile from her home.
Jaques picked the girl up and gave her a small towel to cover herself while he called it in to the Volusia Sheriff's Office, according to WESH 2. The girl's father had reported his three-year-old daughter, who has autism, missing, and a deputy arrived at the scene 22 minutes later while their body camera recorded the encounter. Jaques told the station he was worried about traffic and other roadway dangers while he waited, and that the girl appeared healthy despite the ordeal.
How She Got Out
Deputies checked the girl's home and found no signs of neglect, and the girl's mother told them her daughter likely escaped through a broken bedroom window panel. No arrests were made. The distinction matters under Florida law: state statute defines criminal child neglect as a caregiver's willful failure to provide necessary supervision, a threshold that an accidental window escape does not meet without evidence of intentional disregard, according to the Florida Legislature.
Even so, the Volusia Sheriff's Office sent a copy of its incident report to the Department of Children and Families, a step required regardless of fault. Under Florida's Protection of Vulnerable Persons Act, anyone who knows or reasonably suspects child neglect must report it to the state's central abuse hotline, per the Florida Department of Children and Families. The girl was reunited with her parents, and Jaques credited the Sheriff's Office for responding in force.
A Second Rescue, Two Decades Apart
This was not the first time Jaques found a wandering toddler alone. About 20 years earlier, in 2006, he rescued a small child from the middle of Veterans Memorial Parkway in Volusia County and returned the toddler to their mother, WESH 2 reported. Jaques, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who has served with the Sanford Airport Police Department, has six children and 13 grandchildren of his own.
On August 4, the Sanford Airport Authority Board presented Jaques with a Chief's Commendation Award during its board meeting, recognizing him for preventing what could have been a tragedy, according to the Sanford Airport Police Department. The department noted that Jaques secured the child while commuting to work, underscoring how close the encounter came to happening on any ordinary morning.
Why Wandering Is So Dangerous
Elopement, as the behavior is known, is common among children with autism. Roughly 49% of autistic children engage in wandering or elopement after age four, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Autism Association cited by Champions ABA, with the behavior peaking between ages four and nine. Drowning accounts for 91% of wandering-related fatalities among autistic children under 14, and more than a third of children who elope are nonverbal or unable to state their name or address, according to research from the National Autism Association.
Those risks have played out locally. In June, a 17-month-old Deltona toddler drowned after slipping unnoticed through an open sliding glass door into a backyard pool. Drownings of two other local autistic boys in Deltona and Ormond Beach led the Volusia Sheriff's Office to launch Project Lifeline in December 2024, joining the national Project Lifesaver program to equip at-risk families with wearable GPS transmitters, ShareWear bracelets, and window and door alarms, per the Volusia Sheriff's Office.
The sheriff's office also runs a countywide Autism Awareness Program, established in 2022, that lets families register contact information and place vehicle or home decals so responding deputies know in advance if they may encounter a nonverbal child. More than 1,000 families had registered by late 2024, according to Halifax Health. The Sanford Airport Authority, which operates the police department Jaques serves, was created by the Florida Legislature in 1971 as a special district with its own dedicated law enforcement agency holding full authority across state and local jurisdictions, per the Office of the Florida Attorney General.
