The Almighty has His ways to help us deal with our problems at the right time. Even at times when we think that what we are going through is too impossible to solve, He answers our prayers in mysterious ways. When a tragedy happened to a family from South Carolina where a man broke into their home, brutally beaten a mother and kidnapped a 4-year-old girl, nobody knew what to expect.
On February 13, a mother from South Carolina was not able to pick up her two daughters from school and the administrators knew that something was not right. They immediately called the police and the officers didn’t waste time and directly visited the family’s home. What they found was something that they never expected.
A man mysteriously broke into a John Island home and beaten the mother leaving her in a very bad state. The husband who was a former firefighter is in the Coast Guard and was out of town for training when the incident happened. What saddened everyone was that the man kidnapped the family’s 4-year-old daughter, Heidi Renae Todd. The mom was rushed to the hospital where she would need to undergo emergency surgery. A huge search was immediately started to look for Heidi and her kidnapper.
The whole community joined forces and searched every area for any sign of little Heidi but they found nothing. The very next day and about 400 miles from John Island in Riverside, Alabama, two Norfolk Southern employees who were working on a railroad noticed a car that was parked just near the area where they were working on. It was a strange sight because this place is already deep in the woods and too far away from any roads. The workers alerted the police about this suspicious vehicle.
Rick Oliver, the Riverside Police Chief approached the car carefully. He looked inside and saw a man sleeping next to a wide awake little girl. He confronted the man and the guy did not think twice and just handed the girl over and he sped away with the vehicle. “I knew he was going to run. I just had that feeling,” Oliver said. It was later on that day that the police officer figured out that the girl he saved was Heidi, the missing girl that everyone was looking for.
They were able to catch and arrest the guy who had taken Heidi just over the Mississippi line after a short car chase. He was identified as Thomas Lawton Evans, a 27-year-old who is a felon and was just released from prison earlier that month. The Riverside Police are still trying to determine whether there is a connection between Evans and the Todd family or whether that was just a random attack.
The family was just happy that Heidi is back home and she is safe with them from now on. According to the Mayor of Charleston, Mayor John Tecklenburg, “What could have been a day of real tragedy has turned out to be a day of great joy.” According to the statement from Chief Rick Oliver, that moment when he safely returned Heidi to her family, it was the brightest of his 20-year law enforcement career. “This is a blessing. It is nothing to do with luck. The good Lord put me in that place,” the officer said.
