Wandering tot rescued; dad charged
Samaritans to boy’s aid
New Hampshire mother Joanne Daigle was arriving home when she spotted a 3-year-old boy standing alone in the street of her cul-de-sac. He was crying and holding a broom. He wasn’t wearing shoes and his socks were cold and wet.
“I’d never seen the boy before,” she told me yesterday. “I’ve lived here for 20 years.”
Daigle and a letter carrier quickly came to the lost boy’s aid. The youngster — who was reunited with his mom a few hours later after someone recognized his photo on social media — is safe and sound today thanks to the kind-hearted Good Samaritans.
Daigle, 57, was returning home shortly before 11:30 a.m yesterday, pulling into her Londonderry condo complex behind the mail carrier, when she saw the boy. Neither woman recognized him.
The postal worker comforted the boy in her lap while sitting on her mail truck’s step.
Daigle grabbed a blanket from her car and called the property manager.
The women wrapped the boy’s chilly feet in the blanket to warm them up. He was wearing a winter coat and hood.
The women asked the boy all sorts of questions, trying to figure out who he was and where he had come from.
“He said, ‘I live in a blue house,’ but there are no blue houses around here,” Daigle said. “They’re all brick.”
“This poor little boy,” Daigle thought. “He must be scared. He doesn’t know where he is. I don’t know where he came from.”
The little boy told them his name. He told them he’d been chasing a cat and had “walked a long way.” He held up three little fingers when he was asked his age.
“He was talkative for someone who was lost,” Daigle said.
When the property manager arrived, he didn’t know the boy either, so he called police. Officers knocked on dozens of doors but no one in the quiet neighborhood knew him.
They put the boy in the front seat of a cruiser. Daigle could tell he was scared. “Oh no, no, this is OK,” the two women and property manager told him. “These are friends of ours and they’re going to take really good care of you.”
An officer gave him a police badge sticker.
At the police station, the cops played with the boy in the roll call room. They gave him coloring books and stuffed animals. They took his photo and put it on social media, asking anyone who knows him or his parents to call police. People did. As it turned out, the boy’s father, Joseph Killgren, 35, was at 7 Fieldstone Drive across the culde-sac from where he was found. Police charged Killgren with endangering the welfare of a child. He was held on $5,000 bail and is set to be arraigned today. Police are still investigating how the boy got outside.
The boy was reunited with his mother, who doesn’t live at that address, around 2 p.m.
Neighbors said the boy is lucky he didn’t wander into the nearby busy street and that it was a mild day.
Daigle was happy to hear the boy was OK. “If the mail person or I didn’t show up,” she said, “he would have been just standing here. Crying.”