In exclusive interview with SooToday, dad of 11-year-old girl shares new details about how his daughter got lost — and how she survived while rescuers worked frantically to find her
SAULT STE. MARIE — For 29 excruciating hours, Ruby Kerr’s family and friends experienced every possible emotion, from crippling fear to indescribable relief. Now that he’s had a few days to process what transpired — and talk to his daughter about her night all alone in the forest — Ruby’s father feels something else: pride and amazement.
“I must have watched it 100 times,” Ivan says of the heartwarming footage. “To see it outside of the moment made me realize the emotions that were tied up into that. It’s sheer joy.” Ivan confirms that the day before Ruby went missing, she had ventured beyond the outdoor playing borders for a period of time while the class was playing a manhunt-type game. He says she reached the St. Kateri sign on Goulais Avenue before eventually making her way back to the learning centre.
“I don’t really know why she kept walking,” Ivan says. “She’s competitive and I guess she wanted to rescue herself. She just kept going, she had fallen, and then just got more and more turned around.” Having lived in Barrie, Calgary, Saskatoon, and now the Sault, Ruby’s father considers his family to be city people. Which is why he is so impressed with all the quick thinking his daughter did — even though she was alone in the darkness and wearing just shorts and a T-shirt.
At one point, Ivan says Ruby caught a frog. “She had a little pin on her shirt, and she said she was going to use that to kill the frog and maybe try to pull its arms and legs and eat those,” he says. “But she said she felt too bad to eat it.” According to Environment Canada, the temperature dipped to a low of 5 degrees Celsius early that early Saturday morning, May 13.
“The detective on Saturday said he needed to know the make of her shoe and the size because they had found this footprint about eight kilometres from St. Kateri,” Kerr recalls. “I happened to have a picture of my girls at a Bushplane event last week, and Ruby was wearing those same shoes — and the bottom of her shoes were in the picture.”Dispatched to that specific area, an OPP helicopter flying overhead spotted Ruby within 30 minutes. She was nine kilometres north of St. Kateri.
“We wanted to run to the helicopter but we had to wait a minute,” he says. “That was the longest wait — just standing there. She was waving from the window, and you just wanted to hold her.”
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