'We grieve together': The Lucas Hernandez case engaged the Wichita community and beyond
It was evident in the way news spread Thursday night, in hushed tones and with lowered eyes.
"They found Lucas."
No last name necessary. Everyone knew, and everyone mourned.
It was Lucas Hernandez, the missing Wichita boy, whose body was discovered Thursday in rural Harvey County.
We shared our grief on social media and in quiet conversations. For three months our community had watched and waited, followed news of the search, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.
His face stared down at us from billboards, the smiling preschooler in a blue plaid shirt.
"He is Wichita's son," said Sheila Medlam, part of an army of volunteers who helped with the search. "But I think there is a whole country that has come to love him."
Experts say it's not surprising Lucas captured the hearts of so many people, including ones who had never known him or his family.
"The death of a child, it is a grief like no other, and it strikes at the heart of our community," said D. Brook Houchen, a licensed specialist clinical social worker in Wichita.
"The longer that a child is missing, it creates a crescendo of wanting to find answers — not only for the family, the investigators, the helping professionals, but for the community as a whole."
Dustie McElwain, a 26-year-old mother of three, said she felt compelled to help with the search for Lucas because the boy reminded her of her own young children.
"We're mothers. I mean, it's a missing child — there's no way you can not do anything and everything," McElwain said.
"I've lost hours of sleep. I've kind of put my own family on the back burner and kind of focused on Lucas," she said. "But I kept telling my husband, 'What if this were our child?' That's always been my thought."
Through the months-long search, McElwain befriended 25-year-old Blythe Tucker, a Derby mom who sometimes searched parks and culverts with her youngest child strapped to her in an infant carrier. The two women have grown close, calling or texting each other regularly.
"I'm all for being like a voice for kids, especially ones that are helpless," Tucker said Friday.
"I didn't know what happened to him. I didn't know the situation, and I don't like to prejudge," she said. "He just needed somebody there for him, and he got a lot of us."
He got a lot of us: mothers, fathers, teachers and truck drivers. We watched and listened and waited and hoped.
Early on, Lucas reminded many in Wichita of another child lost nearly 30 years ago — Nancy Shoemaker, a 9-year-old girl who went to a gas station to buy a bottle of soda in the summer of 1990 and was found more than six months later in a Sumner County field. That one ended tragically, too, after searches and vigils.
Others remembered Jaquilla Scales, a 4-year-old Wichita girl who vanished in the middle of the night from a home on North Volutsia in 2001. She remains in the database of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, her childhood photo paired with a computer-generated one showing what she might look like at age 13.
Tucker recalls Caylee Anthony, a 2-year-old Florida girl whose mysterious death continues to haunt people seven years after the girl's mother was controversially acquitted of her murder.
"I do a lot of research," said Tucker, who started one of the Facebook discussion pages for Lucas Hernandez and helped with a GoFundMe page that raised money to hire a private investigator.
"There were a lot of questions in this case that were not answered, and I think that prompted the community to question and to look for answers," she said. "It's like, 'What happened? Where is he?' That brought people even more into it, too."
Stephanie Anderson, coordinator of school counselors for the Wichita school district, says the outpouring of assistance in the Lucas Hernandez case — and now, a citywide grief — illustrates the community's devotion to children and families.
"First of all, it's human nature — we care about our children," Anderson said. "As a parent, you want your kids to be safe, and you want other people's kids to be safe.
"Wichita is a very family-based community. We are supportive of each other, and that's been demonstrated again and again in lots of different situations."
Houchen, the social worker, said people who become particularly invested in a case like the Lucas disappearance can experience what's known as secondary trauma. The act of listening to traumatic events or helping those close to a victim can take an emotional toll.
Houchen sometimes leads "critical incident stress debriefings," where therapists help people talk about what's happened and process their grief.
"This is a large city, but when it comes to a crisis in the community, we all wrap around one another and we go out of our way to help one another," she said.
Anderson, the school district official, also leads the Wichita district's crisis response team that reports to schools following the death of a student or staff member. During Lucas' disappearance, some students at Beech Elementary, where the boy attended pre-kindergarten, painted rocks with Lucas' name and placed them around the city.
"One of the things that I love about being a mom here in Wichita is we are modeling true empathy when we are outpouring support, whether it's a child death or adult death of any kind," Anderson said.
"We've got a lot of good people out there, and we are a strong, kind community," she said. "When something bad happens, we grieve together."
This story was originally published May 26, 2018 at 1:49 PM with the headline "'We grieve together': The Lucas Hernandez case engaged the Wichita community and beyond."