Master Deputy Laura Jenkins has received an international honor for a traffic stop that ended with a missing 11-year-old boy pulled away from a registered sex offender and the man later sentenced to decades behind bars. The Flagler County Sheriff's Office says Jenkins separated the child from Darnell Hairston during the Dec. 31, 2025 stop, a moment that organizers of the award say exemplifies looking past a routine plate check to catch something far more serious.
An International Honor for a New Year's Eve Stop
Jenkins was presented Tuesday with the 2026 International Association of Chiefs of Police Leadership in Looking Beyond the License Plate Award, according to the Flagler County Sheriff's Office. The agency says she was recognized for her role in the rescue of a missing child during a traffic stop on Dec. 31, 2025, and that during that stop she separated the child from the suspect, who was a registered sex offender. As WFTV reports, the award specifically honors Jenkins' role in rescuing an 11-year-old boy who had been reported missing from St. Johns County.
Per First Coast News, deputies stopped a truck on U.S. 1 in Flagler County that day and discovered inside it the missing boy, Darnell Hairston, and Junior Bishop. The IACP/Flock Safety award, per the International Association of Chiefs of Police, recognizes the dedication and initiative of individual police officers whose traffic-stop work helps prevent or detect more serious crimes.
What Happened to the Suspects
Hairston was arrested and convicted in connection with the kidnapping, according to the Sheriff's Office. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, with the agency's case update noting he pleaded no contest to kidnapping involving bodily harm, aggravated child abuse, battery by strangulation, robbery with a deadly weapon and resisting an officer without violence. The News-Journal, citing court proceedings, reported that Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols handed down the sentence on Sept. 9, 2026.
Bishop is identified by the Sheriff's Office as Hairston's co-conspirator in the kidnapping and is still awaiting trial. An earlier report had indicated investigators were still determining whether Bishop was a co-conspirator, a distinction the agency's more recent account resolves by naming him as such.
A Boy's Account and a Deputy's Career
According to the Sheriff's Office, the boy told Jenkins he had been kidnapped and believed he would have died without deputies' rescue. Jenkins joined the Flagler County Sheriff's Office in 2018 and was promoted to Deputy First Class in April 2023 and to Master Deputy in May 2026, the agency said. Her record there includes four Unit Citations, seven Life Saving awards and nine Commendation letters.
Jenkins holds certifications in Critical Incident Stress Management and Crisis Negotiation, and she is active with the Shop with a Cop Committee and the Law Enforcement Mental Wellness Committee, per the same agency account. She said she was honored and humbled to receive the award and be recognized alongside other law enforcement professionals, adding that her career accomplishments were made possible by support from fellow deputies, supervisors, family and the community.
The IACP/Flock Safety award has previously gone to officers for different kinds of plate-based police work; one past example cited by the association involved officers who proactively ran plates during discretionary time and used a hit to stop a vehicle reported stolen. Jenkins' case, by contrast, centers on what happened after deputies had already pulled a vehicle over — turning a traffic stop into the end of a child's kidnapping ordeal.
