Elizabeth Smart reaches out to rescued Wis. girl
13-year-old found alive 3 months after abduction
Abduction survivor Elizabeth Smart on Friday celebrated the rescue of a 13year-old Wisconsin girl whose parents were allegedly murdered by the man accused of kidnapping her.
“What a miracle!!! Jayme Closs has been found !!!! ” Smart said in an Instagram post Friday, 16 years after her own rescue following her abduction at the age of 14 from her Salt Lake City, Utah, home. “… What has been such a heart-wrenching tragedy finally has some happiness in the story.”
Jake Thomas Patterson, 21, was arrested on kidnapping and murder charges Thursday, shortly after Closs sought help from a woman walking her dog in a rural neighborhood near the small town of Gordon, Wisc., about 60 miles north of her family’s Barron home, where she vanished when her parents were killed on Oct. 15.
Barron County Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald said during a news conference Friday that Closs was taken against her will. He said investigators believe Patterson killed Closs’ parents because he wanted to abduct her, and that Patterson “planned his actions and took many steps to hide his identity.”
The woman who first spotted Closs on Thursday, Jeanne Nutter, said she was walking her dog when a skinny, disheveled girl in shoes too big for her feet called out to her for help. Only then did Closs reveal her name and tell Nutter she had walked away from a cabin where she’d been held captive, not far from the woman’s home.
“She just yelled, ‘Please help me. I don’t know where I am. I’m lost,’ ” Nutter, a social worker who spent years working in child protection, told The Associated Press on Friday. “My only thought was to get her to a safe place.”
The two went elsewhere in the neighborhood, to the home of Peter and Kristin Kasinskas.
“I honestly still think I’m dreaming right now. It was like I was seeing a ghost,” Peter Kasinskas told The Minneapolis Star Tribune. “My jaw just went to the floor.”
Closs was taken to a hospital but has since been medically cleared and released, Fitzgerald said.
She went missing after police discovered someone had broken into her family’s home and fatally shot her parents, James and Denise Closs.
Detectives pursued thousands of tips, watched dozens of surveillance videos and conducted numerous searches in the effort to find her. Some tips led officials to recruit 2,000 volunteers for a massive ground search on Oct. 23, but it yielded no clues.
Fitzgerald said in November that as he worked to find Closs, he kept similar cases in the back of his mind, including the 2002 abduction of Smart, who was rescued nine months later with the help of two witnesses who recognized her abductors from an “America’s Most Wanted” episode.
“I hope we may all continue to support and embrace Jayme as she reclaims her life and comes to terms with the reality of her situation,” Smart said. “What a brave, strong and powerful survivor !!!! No matter what may unfold in her story, let’s all try to remember that this young woman has SURVIVED, and whatever other details may surface, the most important will still remain that she is alive. May god bless you Jayme Closs, and may we all continue to search for every missing child.”
Closs’ grandfather, Robert Naiberg, told the AP on Friday that he’d been praying for months for the call he received Thursday about his granddaughter being found alive.
“Praise the Lord,” Closs’ aunt, Sue Allard, told the Star Tribune between sobs. “It’s the news we’ve been waiting on for three months. I can’t wait to get my arms around her. I just can’t wait.”