‘It’s like she just went on this big adventure’: Adalyn Skinner’s mom grateful for help finding NL girl who was missing 22 hours in woods

After getting home from school on Friday, May 30, Adalyn Skinner was outside playing with her grandmother when she made a mad dash into the woods.

“She got home from school by special transportation, we call it, and my mom normally looks after her for about one to two hours after school until I get home from work,” explained Adalyn’s mother, Sarah Burton.

Adalyn has autism and ADHD, and has gone off to explore the nature surrounding her home before, but never like this.

“She was after having lunch and they were outside, and my daughter just took off up in the woods,” said Burton. “It’s not overly uncommon for her to do, but she never goes very far, and we always sing out ‘Adalyn, turn around and come back!’ and she always does.”

This time, she was simply too fast for her grandmother to catch.

Her grandmother continued calling out to her, then decided to call Burton.

‘She just always comes back’

Burton left work and came home, still thinking her daughter couldn’t have gone too far and she’d be back in no time.

“She’s just hiding or she’s around because that’s what she does,” said Burton. “She just always comes back.

“I came home, and by that time, both my mom and my brother and my uncle were looking for her and hadn’t found her. So, I made the decision to just go ahead and call 911.”

Burton went out searching herself, following a wooded road near her home for about 45 minutes to an hour, still finding no trace of her daughter.

“My brother and his neighbour came up, picked me up and we went even further than what I walked and couldn’t find her,” she explained.

‘Six or seven different search and rescue teams’

By the time they got back to Burton’s property, the whole area was full of equipment, RCMP, Triple Bay Eagles search and rescue, and volunteers. People had begun searching and brought in resources to help find Adalyn.

“They used two dogs, they used helicopters, I don’t know how many searchers,” she said. “I think there was six or seven different search and rescue teams that came up.”

By nightfall on Friday, though, she still hadn’t been found.

The search and rescue teams continued searching through the night while Burton’s mind began jumping to worst-case scenarios.

“There was big lines of people walking through the woods, all geared up all night, and the drones were going,” she recalled. “I think they had four drones. It went on and on until the next morning and into the afternoon.”

Is that Adalyn?

On Saturday afternoon, Burton’s friend’s mom, who lives about three or four kilometres down the road, was getting ready to head out and volunteer for the search. But when she got in her car, she spotted what looked to be little Adalyn at Burton’s late great-uncle’s house.

“There’s a house that belonged to my late great-uncle, and so she happened to look towards his house and she was just coming around the corner,” explained Burton.

She approached the house carefully, worried she’d scare Adalyn away.

Once she reached her, Adalyn was asking for her Great-Uncle Derek, who is still alive and lives across the road.

“She gently just said, ‘You want to see Uncle Derek, you come with me, and I’ll take you to Uncle Derek and your mommy and your nan and everybody.’ She managed to ease her into the car, and she drove her right to my house,” explained Burton.

Preparing for the worst

Early Saturday morning, Burton found herself alone and decided to go down to a neighbour’s house who was away and said it was OK to check the property.

While she was there, she began thinking of her grandmother, who had passed away just last Christmas, and remembered that it was also the anniversary of her great-uncle’s passing.

“He was in a boating accident that involved an iceberg. He tragically lost his life and, in the process, he saved the life of a little boy and his grandfather before he perished,” she explained.

Walking down the road alone, Burton finally had the chance to feel as upset as she was, to experience it fully. She found herself praying to both her grandmother and great-uncle, Wade, to bring her daughter home.

“I started just kind of saying, ‘Nan, Uncle Wade, can you find her?’” she recalled.

As the morning progressed without any updates on Adalyn’s whereabouts, Burton began to truly imagine the worst.

She said for a while in the beginning she believed wholeheartedly that Adalyn was just behind the house, not far, perhaps sitting down playing with grass, because that’s what she usually does.

The longer it took, the further this theory went from her mind.

A miracle

Burton was sitting at the table in her house, mentally preparing herself for the worst possible thing to happen, when she heard some people yelling her name and saying, “She’s here, she’s here.”

She didn’t believe it at first; it was a miracle, she says.

Burton ran out to see her brother carrying her daughter to the house from her friend’s mother’s car.

“I never ran down my patio so fast before, but I went down and grabbed her,” she recalled.

Adalyn was out in the wild for 22 hours and returned home covered head to toe in mud, twigs, mosquito bites, a few cuts and bruises, and trench foot.

Emotionally and physically, she seemed unphased.

Lots of sleeping and eating

The juice, doughnuts, and muffins from folks in the community were what little Adalyn went for immediately when she got inside.

Paramedics who were on hand checked her vitals, and they were great. She was wet, cold, hungry, and thirsty, but she was fine, Burton said.

They went to the hospital just to be sure and spent most of the afternoon and evening there.

“She slept in the ambulance, she went to the hospital. She had, I think, four cups of juice, two popsicles and a Happy Meal, and then she went to sleep for like hours,” Burton recalled.

“She was just so hungry and when she woke up again, she immediately wanted another Happy Meal, so we got her another one.”

Later, when they got home, Adalyn went right back to playing. All of a sudden, Burton couldn’t hear anything and found her daughter had put herself to bed just a bit after 8 p.m.

“She slept the whole night, she was so tired,” said Burton. “It’s just crazy, and we’re trying to piece together what happened now, we’re trying to figure out where she went. We still really don’t know.”

Nobody is really sure, but they suspect she went behind Weybridge and made her way across four brooks. The last brook runs right along where she was found.

Burton and her brother have shown Adalyn photos of search and rescue vehicles and surrounding areas during the search, but she is partially non-verbal, so they have only gotten hints as to what she may recognize in the images.

“I’m after showing her pictures of the drones and pictures of the Triple Bay Eagles trucks with the lights on them and the RCMP and I’m like, ‘Did you see this? Did you see this?’ And I can’t remember if I showed her a picture of the red helicopter or if I mentioned it, but when I did that, she said, ‘Oh, red helicopter.’ I’m pretty sure she saw the red helicopter going around,” said Burton.

Building a safe space for Adalyn

Since Adalyn got home, Burton’s friends Alicia Barrett and Victoria Lethbridge have started up fundraisers to help get a fence built in Burton’s backyard.

It’s an initiative to create a safe space for Adalyn where she can continue to roam around and explore nature without fear of running away or getting lost.

There have already been around 60 people who have donated. The fundraiser is a draw where the winner will get a photography session with Barrett, but a lot of folks have just donated without entering the fundraiser itself.

A Facebook group called Help Build a Safe Space for Adalyn has also been started, where folks can start up their own initiatives to lend a helping hand.

Just last night, Burton said, there was a group at her house talking about the design of the fence and how soon they could get it up, and they’re thinking it could be done before the end of the summer.

Everybody under the sun was on the street

Throughout the entire process, since Adalyn first went missing, the response from the community has been absolutely unreal, Burton said.

“There were neighbours, there were friends, there were strangers, like everybody under the sun was on the street,” she recalled. “There were vehicles and people everywhere with their gear and ready to go.”

She said there isn’t a time she can remember seeing so many people on Random Island before.

Folks in the community have continued looking for footprints or tracks of any kind for where she may have gone, although they may never know.

Burton can’t emphasize enough the gratitude she feels for every single individual who helped and lent a hand in some way to find her daughter.

And after everything, little Adalyn appears absolutely unfazed.

“She is playing and going around the house, playing pretend, playing with her toys, doing everything she normally would,” said Burton in disbelief.

“It’s like she just went on this big adventure.”