The Independence community came together Friday evening to help locate Persephone “Percy” Ross, a local 3-year-old girl who was reported missing in the early evening.
Ross was located safely at 10:50 p.m. Friday night after a huge search effort involving residents and several emergency service agencies from around the region.
Independence Police Chief Brian Ferayorni told LINK nky the timespan from when police received the call to when Ross was finally found was between four and five hours.
“In response to reports of a missing three-year-old, hundreds of citizens came out to help search the woods, clear ponds, and go street to street,” according to a joint statement from Ferayorni and Independence Mayor Chris Reinersman posted on social media the day after the incident.
The search effort also saw the deployment of over a hundred emergency personnel from local agencies, including the Kenton County Police, the Independence Fire District and Police Department, Campbell County Police, Newport Police and the county branch of the Emergency Management Agency, among others.
The call came in around 6 p.m., Ferayorni said. Just before her disappearance, Ross had been seen in the front yard of her residence on Wayman Drive wearing a black tank top with teal shorts. Around the same time, Ross’s mother, Tiffani Nichol Carter, posted on Facebook that Ross had gone missing and asked the community for help. LINK nky has reached out to Carter for comment.
Following Carter’s post, community discussion groups on social media lit up with chatter, notably about the possibility of a search party. Meanwhile, the county sent out notifications using the CodeRED service, which delivers automated messages to local residents about emergency situations, instructing them to search around their own properties for signs of Ross. Citizens with police scanners kept others informed of the search progress on social media.
Ross was finally located unharmed, Ferayorni said, and went home with her mother that night. In a social media post the following morning, Carter actually posted the spot where Ross had been hiding. Evidently, Ross had crawled into a cat house on her neighbor’s property later moving underneath a nearby patio chair.
“She said she woke up and was getting hot so she ‘sneaked’ out and under this chair across from the cat house, where she was then found by search volunteers,”reads Carter’s post.
“She is completely unscathed, just very shaken up, scared and now learning the gravity of her actions and how to prevent anything like this from happening again in the future,” the post continues.
Ferayorni commended local residents for their willingness to assist.
“We’re very proud of our city,” Ferayorni said.
Kenton Hornbeck contributed reporting to this story.