A toddler was spending a summer Friday playing with bubbles alongside his mom in their backyard in Senoia, Georgia, last week when he made a potentially lifesaving discovery.
Brittany Moore told WGCL-TV in Atlanta that her one-and-a-half-year-old son Ethan was chasing bubbles by the fence of the property with the family’s dogs when something caught his eye.
“I went over there and was like, ‘What do you see buddy?’ and he pointed and said, ‘Feet,’” Ms Moore told the television station. “‘Okay, buddy can you say that again. What did you say?’ And he said, ‘Feet.’”
All ms Moore could initally see of the spot her son was pointing to was trees. But after approaching the spot and kneeling down alongside him, she too saw a pair of feet.
Initally, Ms Moore said, she was panicked – not sure whether the pair of feet she was seeing represented a threat to her young children. But shortly after calling emergency responders, she learned that her son had spotted a person investigators had been searching for all week.
Eighty-two-year-old Nina Lipscomb had been reported missing on Monday night. Ms Lipscomb has early stage Alzheimer’s, and told her daughter Karen Lipscomb that she was leaving the house to look for her deceased daughter. Investigators had been using thermal technology to search for her in the intervening days, but, in the end, it was Ethan’s sharp eyesight that made the difference.
“We pulled out every resource we thought we needed but it was a little boy and she’s very fond of children,” said Karen Lipscomb told WGCL-TV.
Ms Lipscomb was disoriented when emergency responders found her close to Ms Moore’s property, and spent several days in the hospital recouperating. When she was released on Monday, she met Ethan and his family. Ethan’s family declined an offer of reward money from Ms Lipscomb’s family, but Ethan did accept a bag of toy bubbles as a gift.
