Night at sandpit: story of 4-year-old’s escape, survival

They screamed for the 4-year-old girl to escape.

In a surge of desperation, the 4-year-old’s mother and 6-year-old sister rapidly repeated their warning after the man attacked them with a black-handle knife.

“Run! Run! Run!”

Their command would have to overcome a 4-year-old’s inclination to run to her mother and big sister – not away from them – at such a terrifying moment.

That’s the way District Attorney Marc Bennett sees what unfolded late the night of Nov. 3 and into the morning of Nov. 4 at a remote spot north of Wichita.

Other aspects of the desperation became clear at the crime scene – imprinted in the mud.

Based on the investigation, Bennett concluded:

▪ The attacker chased the girl when she ran.

▪ She probably got away because it was so dark – the attacker couldn’t catch her because he couldn’t see her.

▪ Somehow, the 4-year-old survived seven to eight hours outdoors in the cold near the sandpit.

It’s remarkable, considering the child was wounded.

And she was wearing only pajamas as the temperature fell into the 40s.

And she was alone.

Bennett, the county’s elected chief prosecutor, said he could share the story of the girl’s escape because the case against the attacker – Hassan Wright – has recently been resolved. Wright waived his right to appeal.

On Jan. 13, Wright, 47, received a life sentence. At the time of the attack, he was on parole. Prosecutors said he kidnapped his niece and her two young daughters, sexually assaulted the mother and stabbed all three over 12 hours, severely injuring the mother and fatally wounding the 6-year-old.

Amid the violence, Bennett said, there is the story of the 4-year-old’s survival.

Details, background

In the light of day, investigators could see that the child left “little footprints” in the mud as she escaped into a bare field, Bennett said in an interview this past week.

Along with the set of small footprints, investigators found an adult’s shoe prints in the earth. The movements were imprinted at a sand-dredging site under construction near 77th and Ridge. The investigation determined that the adult prints were the attacker’s, not the mother’s, Bennett said.

It was “pitch black” that night, Bennett noted. There was no lighting. It was a dark construction site with the nearest house maybe three-quarters of a mile away beyond a tall barbed wire fence.

The man who had kidnapped the mother and her two young daughters in her Jeep Commander had begun stabbing the three with the knife after the mother freed her hands with a pocket knife and cut him in the throat as she tried to defend herself and her daughters. But his injury was too minor to stop him.

With his attack interrupted, the youngest girl got away.

“If he could have seen her, he would have caught her,” Bennett said.

Where she ran, he said, “There was nothing for her to hide behind. It was an empty field.”

How it unfolded

Earlier that night, Wright had come over to the mother’s house. He has been described as her estranged uncle. He asked for a ride. It was time for the girls to go to sleep, so the 4-year-old was wearing pajamas.

As they drove off, the 4-year-old wore sandals, a black long-sleeve shirt and green-and-white polka-dot shorts.

At one point, Wright turned angry and pulled out the black-handled knife on the mother.

Later, the Jeep Commander, with Wright, the mother and her two daughters, was driven through a gate on the west end of the Mid-States Sand site on North 77th west of Ridge.

It is a sprawling site, along a sand-and-gravel road in a rural area. You can see house lights across the fields. But in the darkness, even if she had noticed the lights, they might look too distant or unrecognizable to a 4-year-old, Bennett said.

At the site lies a mound of dirt – as tall as a semi-trailer and running for hundreds of feet. The mound is along 77th close to the road.

Investigators could see where the Jeep pulled behind the mound, where the stabbing could be inflicted out of view.

From there, the girl’s footprints veered into cultivated ground spreading west from the sandpit.

The adult’s footprints darted out into the mud, back and forth several times, Bennett said.

From the mother’s description of what happened, it couldn’t be her footprints, he said. The mother ran out of her slippers as she tried to escape with her other daughter. To Bennett, the shoe and foot prints showed that the attacker ran after the girl.

The attack at the sandpit could have begun as early as 11:30 that night. It was a Thursday.

After the 4-year-old escaped, Wright continued to stab the mother and the 6-year-old, then drove off with the severely wounded mother and the dying 6-year-old.

The 4-year-old remained behind in the darkness.

She was wounded, though not as seriously as her mother and sister. She had suffered a stab wound to her abdomen and a cut to her torso. She had blood on her shirt and apparently wiped some of it onto her face.

The hazards

Eventually, after her escape, the girl went north and east near where the new sandpit had been dug. A berm surrounded the pit. It held water that would have been well over her head.

She could have encountered any number of hazards without recognizing the danger.

It was a construction site, not designed for a 4-year-old wandering alone in the dark.

She could have drowned if she fell into the pond. If she saved herself after stumbling into the water, she would have still gotten wet, and that would have put her at more risk of exposure to the cold.

There are so many things that could have gone wrong, Bennett said.

She might have noticed construction equipment around her, some with cabs where she might have taken shelter.

But Bennett doubts that a 4-year-old would know to get into a cab for protection.

The sandpit is a couple of miles east of the Arkansas River, where coyotes and deer roam.

‘What did she do?’

Even now, Bennett isn’t sure how the girl survived.

“I’ve wondered that many times, ‘What did she do?’ ”

How did she conserve her body’s warmth?

Bennett heard from the girl’s mother that the 4-year-old said she slept next to a tree that night.

The construction site is treeless, but there are some bushy weeds around 4 feet tall.

Did she think the attacker was still out there, so she needed to keep hiding?

Bennett wonders if sleeping helped maintain the energy she needed to survive.

‘I want my Mommy’

By the next morning, she had moved in a clockwise circle from where she escaped.

She walked up as construction employees arrived in the dim light. One of the workers took a temperature reading at the job site that morning.

It was 42 degrees – 10 degrees above freezing.

The workers saw blood on the front of her pajama shirt and blood on her face. They assumed that she had a bloody nose and wiped her face, Bennett said.

When they asked her where she was from, she replied, “I want my Mommy.”

They took her into a trailer that serves as an office and called 911 at 8:10 a.m.

By that time, she had been out there for seven to eight hours, Bennett says.

They put a jacket around her.

One of the workers pulled up a cartoon for her on his cellphone.

By that time, police were already busy investigating at a parking lot in south Wichita where the 4-year-old’s mother and 6-year-old sister were found in the Jeep. The interior was covered in blood and oil that the attacker used to try to set them on fire.

Knowing that the woman’s second child was missing, “cops went screaming up there” to the sandpit when the 911 call came in, Bennett said.

The girl’s core body temperature was low by the time police arrived. But thanks to the workers who brought her in, she was warming up, he said.

‘She’s doing well’

It’s “hard to put a positive spin” on what happened that night, Bennett said.

That the mother and her youngest child survived “is astonishing,” he said.

The girl might not have been found had she wandered off and died. And if she hadn’t walked up in time, investigators might not have found the crime scene before key evidence disappeared. On the gravel road near the mound, investigators recovered a broken knife and pooled blood.

The mother was too disoriented to know where the attack happened.

Remaining questions are how much the girl remembers of what happened and how it might affect her.

Bennett said he has learned from years of prosecuting violent crimes that children often don’t remember over the long term.

He saw the 4-year-old at her sister’s funeral.

“And if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know,” he said. “She is a happy-looking little girl.

“By any measure, she’s doing well.”

This story was originally published January 20, 2017 at 3:09 PM with the headline "Night at sandpit: story of 4-year-old’s escape, survival."