Cpl. Jared Havard Waded Neck-Deep Into a Carencro Pond in Full Uniform to Pull Out a Missing 8-Year-Old Nonspeaking Girl With Autism
On the evening of Sept. 6, Lafayette Parish deputies got word that a missing 8-year-old girl had been found, then that she had walked into a pond off Blushing Groom Drive in unincorporated Carencro. By the time Cpl. Jared Havard reached the bank, bystanders were watching from the edge and the child, who has autism and does not speak, was underwater, KPLC reported.
Havard went in wearing his full duty uniform, waded into water up to his neck, reached the girl and brought her back to the bank. She was reunited with her family.
A Rescue on Blushing Groom Drive
The call began as a report of a missing child. Deputies were on their way to the 200 block of Blushing Groom Drive when they learned she had been located but had been seen going into a nearby pond, according to KPLC.
The Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office later released Havard’s body-camera footage and credited his response with “preventing the incident from turning tragic,” Acadiana News First reported on Oct. 14, when the video was made public.
The sheriff’s office has not identified the girl or her family. The rescue happened in September, and the agency released the footage more than five weeks later.
Why Wandering Weighs on Autism Families
Wandering is a documented risk for children with autism. A national survey published in the journal Pediatrics in 2012 found that 49% of children with autism had tried to wander or bolt from a safe place at least once after age 4, compared with 13% of their siblings without autism, according to a summary by the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee.
The study, based on 1,218 children ages 4 to 17 and more than 1,000 of their siblings, found wandering was more common among children with more severe autism. About a quarter of families reported at least one episode in which their child was missing long enough to cause concern.
Parents in the survey described children wandering to explore, to reach a place they enjoyed or to get away from anxiety or uncomfortable sensory input. Half of the families said no one had ever given them guidance on preventing or handling it.
The Danger of Water
The same research points to why a pond is such a worry. Among children who went missing, families reported close calls with traffic in 65% of cases and close calls with drowning in 24%, according to the coordinating committee’s summary.
The Kennedy Krieger Institute, whose Interactive Autism Network ran the survey, reported that 53% of the children who tried to wander actually went missing. Wandering most often started from the child’s own home or another home (74%), followed by stores (40%) and classrooms or schools (29%). Dr. Paul Law, the study’s senior author, directed the network.
Those figures matter for a large group of families. About 1 in 31 8-year-olds in the United States has been identified with autism, according to federal data the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released in April 2025, covering children born in 2014 across 16 sites.
Neck-Deep in Full Gear
The sheriff’s office singled out how Havard handled the moment: he went straight into the pond in his full duty attire, and the water reached his neck, according to both reports, before he got to the child and brought her back to the bank.
The Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office shared the footage on social media, KPLC reported. The agency’s own description of the outcome was short: a girl who had gone underwater was back with her family, and a call that could have ended very differently did not.
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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Paul Lowry – CC BY 4.0/Wikimedia Commons
