Four-year-old found in road just wanted to go home

Looking for answers, Kimberly Weber went to the East Rowan Child Care Center on Tuesday.

She was not satisfied.

“They told me they were told not to talk about it,” Weber said. “I said I can’t keep my child here, and the director said she didn’t blame me.”

One day earlier — the beginning of 4-year-old daughter Jordan Weber’s fourth week at the East Rowan Child Care Center — Jordan walked away from the facility. She had not had any problems before then, her mother said Wednesday.

Passerby Kent Ryan found Jordan walking in the middle of Crescent Road, one block from U.S. Highway 52. She was about a block away from the day care.

Around 8:15 a.m., Ryan had just dropped off his 11-year-old daughter at her grandmother’s house and was on his way to work. He is a lieutenant with the N.C. Department of Correction, working in Albemarle.

Ryan drove up Crescent Road toward U.S. Highway 52. “I saw something down the road, walking in the middle,” he said. At first — from a distance — Ryan thought it was an animal.

But when he got closer, Ryan realized it was a little girl standing in the middle of the road holding a doll in her hand.

He pulled his car along side of her and said, “Don’t you think you are too little to be in the middle of the road?”

“You could tell she had been crying,” Ryan said, but she was not hysterical.

Ryan pulled his jeep to the side of the road and got out. He looked around, hoping to find someone looking for a small child. He said he knocked on a door, but no one answered. When he asked Jordan where she lived, she pointed toward U.S. Highway 52.

Ryan said she kept asking him to take her to her parents.

Since he had no mobile phone on him, Ryan drove her to Sifford’s Phillips 66 gasoline station, just west of Rockwell.

“I just wanted to get her somewhere safe ... I think anybody would have done the same thing,” Ryan said. “I hope if it was my daughter somebody would have done the same thing.”

He asked if anyone knew her, but they did not.

Owner Jim Sifford said Jordan had been crying when Ryan brought her in the store. He said he thought Ryan had talked to her some and calmed her down and that store employees joined in, trying to comfort the child.

Her mother said, Jordan will talk about her time at the gas station. “She said everyone was nice to her, and that she got to have a drink and a cookie.”

Sifford said Jordan kept saying she wanted her daddy.

Ryan asked workers at the gasoline station to contact the Sheriff’s Department and they did.

Ryan went on to work. “I knew she was in good hands,” he said. When he got to work, he called the service station and spoke to the deputy who had by that time arrived.

Deputy K.L Myers responded and talked to Jordan and soon learned where she was from.

From 8:34 a.m., when workers at the day care called her, until close to 9 a.m., Kimberly was hysterical, she said.

“I’m mad that they really didn’t know how long she had been gone,” she said. “I assumed she had been gone five or 10 minutes but they really couldn’t tell me.”

When Myers learned where Jordan had come from, she called the day care.

Mother and daughter soon were reunited.

Jordan will not talk about leaving the center. She told a Rowan Sheriff’s Deputy simply that she was going home, according to reports.

No charges have been filed and the Rowan County Sheriff’s Department is working with the Department of Social Services on the investigation, according to Sheriff’s Department Lt. John Sifford.

Contact Jonathan Weaver at 704-797-4266 or jweaver@salisburypost.com .