Officer who found girl is among DNR heroes
Published: August 27, 2005
Andy Crozier was suspicious of his own hunch. But in the 13th hour of a frustrating search for a lost toddler, he climbed off his all-terrain vehicle and navigated terrain that seemed unsuitable for a barefoot child and her dog.
But then he saw the paw tracks and the footprints, lightly embedded in the wet sand alongside the Ohio River.
Next to a piece of driftwood, the state wildlife conservation officer found Thunder, a black Lab, and Daisy Smith, the 2-year-old girl missing from Bethlehem in Clark County.
The dog was barking; the girl was drenched and shivering, with a body temperature of 95 degrees.
But she survived.
The rescue capped a gripping search that was the focus of attention in the rural community in southeastern Indiana 13 months ago.
Crozier was one of 18 conservation officers honored by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources in ceremonies Friday in the Government Center South near the Statehouse for their work in that rescue, and for other heroic acts.
“The award is a nice thing,” said Crozier, 42, Madison, a conservation officer for 18 years. “But the biggest thing was finding the little girl alive. So many times we’re involved in situations like that, and it doesn’t have a happy ending. We have to tell the parents that they’ve lost a loved one.”
Daisy and the dog had wandered from the family’s back yard. About 90 volunteers, police and firefighters searched within a one-mile radius of her home.
The Department of Natural Resources said the search lasted hours through hills, the lowlands and along the river’s edge. Rescuers found no signs of either the little girl or the family pet, even with heat-seeking equipment on an Indiana State Police helicopter.
Crozier, who persisted in searching overnight, returned to the riverbank in the morning.
He decided to go upstream instead of downstream.
“Something just nudged me and pushed me in that direction,” he said. “Everything that I would have thought from my training and experience was that she couldn’t have gotten that far, but something was nagging on me to go that way.”
After the rescue, a picture distributed by The Associated Press showed him sitting on his ATV, his green jacket dirty, as he handed Daisy to her jubilant parents, Les and Cheryl Smith. The state called it “lost child saved.”
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