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Boys answer a cry for help
Wakinyan, Josh and Ashdaehn came to the aid of a Flandeau woman who had fallen outside and lay there for six hours.
Posted
Carleen Wild
You most likely remember this past Wednesday, the temperatures were warmer than they had been in some time, the day was beautiful and the sun was shining.
Shirlene Miller thought her little dog would enjoy some time in the backyard.
She let ChiChi out and returned inside for a cup of coffee, to do the dishes and to take care of some bills. A half hour later, back at the kitchen window, Shirlene noticed ChiChi had gotten her leash tangled around a post.
Unsure of the snow and ice, she went to see how she might help.
“I thought well…it’s really icy but I’ll walk out there real slow. I had my cane and I didn’t want to come back up and get my jacket. I thought, ‘I can do it.’ I got to the pole and got her untangled. And then as soon as I went to stand back up, my feet went out from under me. I went straight back,” said Shirlene.
That was at 10:30 a.m.
“I just sat there, really in shock that I had fallen, I had no coat on, my cell phone was in the house, this was not on my agenda for the day. I thought, well, I have an Amazon package coming, (the driver) he’ll hear me. But the package was delivered and he either never heard me or ignored my calls for help,” she said.
A FedEx driver also made a delivery nearby. That driver didn’t hear her calls for help either. A few neighbor kids, she said, came and went from school. Others arrived home from work at the apartments nearby.
Shirlene’s skin, with just a t-shirt on, was getting sunburned. Her back and legs were numb from the snow, and her body temperature was falling. She was getting weak and losing her voice after hours of calling for help.
No one heard her, she thinks as she was behind her house which faces an open field. There’s no alley; no nearby street.
“The day was progressing,” Shirlene recounted. “I saw the sun had gone way over now and I wondered, ‘Is it going to get dark soon? What’s going to happen?’ I was starting to lose my voice. And then I heard these kids.”
She started screaming for help again.
Three young friends playing on a nearby snow pile behind Krull’s Garage that they typically would never be at, because maybe it was just a little too far from home, heard Shirlene. They couldn’t see her, but one of the boys, 9-year-old Wakinyan Brushbreaker, shouted back.
“I had been screaming most of the day and all of a sudden one answered me and said, ‘Do you need help?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I had fallen.’ Then it got dead quiet and I thought, ‘This is it.’”
She doesn’t know how long after that Jenny Johnson, one of the boy’s mothers, came around the corner — the boys had run back to her house and told her what they heard. The four drove around and didn’t stop until they found who it was that needed help.
It was 4:30 p.m. when Jenny got to Shirlene and wrapped her coat around her.
Brian Arnold, Police Chief for the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe arrived moments later and called for additional help. Jenny had called Brian hoping that even on his day off, he might best know how to help them find whoever was in need.
“I never let them play that far from home,” Johnson told the Moody County Enterprise. “They always have to stay on the block. It was totally random that I let them walk over there. I don’t think the boys realize how serious the situation was just yet.”
Medical teams were able to bring Shirlene’s core temperature back up to 91 degrees after a few hours in dry clothes and heated blankets. She said it was about 4:30 a.m. the next day before she felt fully warm again.
Shirlene is back home and hoping to thank everyone involved in person, soon. But especially, 9-year-old Wakinyan and 10-year-old Joshua Weston and Ashdaehn Smith-Kuhnel.
“That day, all of those people showed up, they cared and they took their jobs so seriously…at one point the three kids came around the corner (while still in the backyard) and I lost it then. Three kids, about 10-years-old, cared where no one else heard or gave a damn. Those three kids cared and I just felt so blessed. I knew if the sun went down I was dead,” Shirlene said, through tears.
Flandreau Public Schools, where the boys are all in class together, recognized them in an assembly this past Friday. Shirlene has asked that if the City has any sort of recognition for them, they do that as well. A recognition is planned during the City Council’s next meeting on February 21st.
Close friends have also since ordered Shirlene a cell phone holder that she can wear around her neck to be sure she is never in danger again and unable to call for help.
The boys advice to others should they ever be in the same situation again that they were in:
“If you hear anyone yelling for help, go get a trusted adult or someone you can trust and go look for them.”