Six year old taking care of six babies..

`6 babies' By Ellen Barry Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
Tue Sep 6, 9:40 AM ET

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In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood
out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old,
surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their
leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2, and one
was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful
barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in
tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his
name was Deamonte Love.

Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last
week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were
found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown
New Orleans.

In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics
tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed
up that night, brooding.

Transporting the children alone was "the hardest thing I've ever done
in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead" or that they
had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical
technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them
out of New Orleans.

"It goes back to the same thing," he said. "How did a 6-year-old end up
being in charge of six babies?"

Children reported missing

So far, parents displaced by flooding have reported 220 children
missing, but that number is expected to rise, said Mike Kenner of the
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which will help
reunite families.

"When my kids were little I used to lose them in Target, so it's not
hard for me to believe," said Nanette White, press secretary for the
Louisiana Department of Social Services. "Sometimes little kids just
wander off. They're there one second and you blink and they're gone."

At the rescue headquarters, Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics.
He said his father was tall and his mother was short. He gave his
address, his phone number and the name of his elementary school.

He said the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others
were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his
apartment building.

The children were clean and healthy--downright plump in the case of the
infant, said Joyce Miller, a nurse who examined them. It was clear, she
said, that "time had been taken with those kids."

All evening Thursday, volunteer Ron Haynes carried one of the
2-year-old girls back and forth, playing with her until she was calm
enough to eat dinner.

"This baby child was terrified," he said. "After she relaxed, it was
gobble, gobble, gobble."

Late the same night, they got an encouraging report: A woman in a
shelter in Thibodaux, about 45 miles west of New Orleans, was searching
for seven children. People in the building started clapping at the
news. But when they got the mother on the phone, it became clear that
she was looking for a different group, said Sharon Howard, assistant
secretary of the office of public health.

"What that made me understand was that this was happening across the
state," she said. "That kind of frightened me."

The children were transferred to a shelter operated by the Department
of Social Services, with rooms full of toys and cribs where mentors
from the Big Buddy Program were on hand day and night. For the next two
days, the staff did detective work.

One of the 2-year-olds steadfastly refused to say her name until a
worker took her picture with a digital camera and showed it to her. The
little girl pointed at it and cried out, "Gabby!" One of the boys had a
G printed on his T-shirt when he arrived; when volunteers started
calling him G, they noticed that he responded.

Deamonte began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old
Big Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the
helicopter. How he promised her he would take care of his little
brother.

Late Saturday, they found Deamonte's mother, who was in a shelter in
San Antonio along with the four mothers of the other five children.
Catrina Williams, 26, saw her children's pictures on a Web site set up
over the weekend by the National Center for Missing & Exploited
Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight waited to take
the children to Texas.

In a phone interview, Williams said she is the kind of mother who
doesn't let her children out of her sight. What happened, she said, was
that her family, trapped in a New Orleans apartment building, began to
feel desperate.

Wrenching moment

The water wasn't going down, and they had been living without light,
food or air conditioning for four days. The baby needed milk and the
milk was gone. So she decided they would evacuate by helicopter. When a
helicopter arrived, they were told to send the children first and that
the helicopter would be back in 25 minutes.

It was a wrenching moment. Williams' father, Adrian Love, told her to
send the children ahead.

"I told them to go ahead and give them up, because me, I would give my
life for my kids. They should feel the same way," said Love, 48.

The helicopter didn't come back.

While the children were transported to Baton Rouge, their parents wound
up in Texas. Days passed without contact. On Sunday, Williams was
elated.

"All I know is I just want to see my kids," she said. "Everything else
will just fall into place."

At 3 p.m. Sunday, social workers said goodbye to the children who now
had names: Deamonte Love; Darynael Love; Zoria Love and her brother
Tyreek. The girl who cried "Gabby!" was Gabrielle Janae Alexander. The
girl they called Peanut was Degahney Carter. And the boy whom they
called G was actually Lee--Leewood Moore Jr.

The children were strapped into car seats and driven to an airport for
the flight to San Antonio to rejoin their parents. Deamonte was hanging
on to Robertson's neck so desperately that Robertson decided, at the
last minute, to ride with him as far as Lafayette.

Robertson said he doubted the children would remember much of the
evacuation, or the smell of the flooded city.

"I think what's going to stick with them is that they survived
Hurricane Katrina," he said. "And that they were loved."

.

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