JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – They had been slogging through thick, rough woods for hours, fighting briar patches and thorns, and crawling through creeks.
Officer Blake Ortagus almost stepped on a snake and had to stop for a minute until it slithered on its way.
A call came over the radio: You’ve got about 20 minutes until the rainstorm hits.
The searchers looked at each other. They had one mind: We’re finishing this grid search -- rain or no rain.
Teams from the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department and Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office had been searching for 6-year-old Braxton Williams, and his 5-year-old sister, Bri’ya, since the pair were reported missing about 1:30 p.m. Sunday. They had last been seen by family about 11:30 a.m. Sunday playing in the front yard of their Westside mobile home.
As of 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, according to the Sheriff’s Office, investigators had searched more than 430 homes in the community, 130 acres and 20 bodies of water, using air units and K-9s. The FBI, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were among the agencies involved in the search.
Tuesday afternoon, as the search had just passed the crucial 48-hour mark in missing child cases, 19 JSO and JFRD personnel were walking in a line through woods not far from the mobile home park.
Many of them had been in a similar search in Alabama not long ago. It did not end happily.
But they had hope. They believed Braxton and Bri’ya could still be found alive.
“There’s always optimism,” JFRD Lt. Josh Montoro said. “If there was a slight chance of them being alive and found, we were going to find them. The rain, the weather, wasn’t going to stop us.”
Suddenly, Montoro and another searcher stopped: “Was that a child’s voice?” “I heard it, too.”
They held up all the searchers on their line: Wait!
Not sure what else to say, Montoro called out, “Hello?!”
A boy’s head poked out from a rundown pump house nearby and Braxton Williams responded, “Hey guys!” with a little wave.
Montoro and the other man took off running toward the pump house.
The rest of the searchers high-fived, hugged each other and lifted up prayers of gratitude.
Montoro, a veteran of JFRD’s Urban Search and Rescue team, scooped up Bri’ya, who held him tight.
“I wasn’t going to let her go,” Montoro said.
There were rumors the first responders shed some tears in those first happy moments, but Montoro said with a chuckle that there’s no video proof of that.
“There was definitely a lot of emotion going on. This doesn’t usually happen this way,” Montoro said. “We were just so thankful to be part of it.”
Investigators are still trying to piece together exactly what happened, but it appears the children wandered away from their home on their own.
How they found the pump house is unclear. A News4Jax crew attempted to find it in the woods Wednesday but couldn’t pinpoint its location, despite searching for some time. The woods were too thick for Sky4 to spot it from above.
First responders told News4Jax the pump house was very hard to get to, and they weren’t sure they could find it again themselves.
TIMELINE: The search for Braxton and Bri’ya Williams | READ: Grandparents thank everyone who helped rescue missing Jacksonville children
As the searchers carried the children through the quarter-mile of swampy, thick woods back toward safety Tuesday afternoon, they kept them calm by talking about Christmas.
Bri’ya wants a teddy bear, maybe a tablet, Montoro said.
When the searchers asked the hungry children what they wanted to eat, they looked at each other and both said, “Cheese pizza!”
They got their pizza at the hospital, where they were kept overnight for observation after being lost alone in the woods for over two days.
Montoro, who held Bri’ya on his lap in the ambulance and carried her all the way in to the hospital, said it really was a Christmas miracle that the children were found safe.
He said if their line had been searching 20 yards to the left or right, they would have missed the children completely.
“God put us right in the right place at the right time,” Montoro said. “There’s no other reason to have great weather like we did and for those kids to survive the way they did. The best team was out there.”