A car that rolled over multiple times sat in a cotton field with several windows broken out.
Children’s toys, coloring book pages, slippers and a child’s book bag were scattered across the field.
And there was no one around the vehicle.
That was the scene last week along Highway 97 in Walnut Hill. First responders and volunteers searched the field, walking through the row after row of thick, waist-high cotton looking for the driver, a child…anyone that might have been ejected from the vehicle.
The search had a happy ending, with no one found in the field. The driver had fled the scene.
One of the tools used in the search for a possible victim was a drone operated by an Escambia County Sheriff’s Office deputy, one of their certified drone pilots.
The ECSO drone program was one of Sheriff Chip Simmons’ initiatives when he took office, according to Commander Andrew Hobbs.
“We are in the process of building that program with a lot of training,” he said. “We have to understand the statutes and case law about violation of privacy. We are looking at the ways of using technology to best serve the people of Escambia County.”
“We are able to use drones to search for missing persons, suspects in a wooded area…it allows for more availability than other air units and costs are minute compared to a helicopter,” Hobbs added.
Pictured: Escambia County Sheriff’s Office Deputy D. Shaw, a certified drone operator, uses a drone to search a cotton field for a possible wreck victim last week in Walnut Hill. Pictured top inset: Coloring book pages, toys and other children’s items were found in the field near an overturned car (bottom inset). Pictured below: The drone over the cotton field. Pictured bottom: Volunteers and first responders also walked through the cotton field. NorthEscambia.com photos, click to enlarge.
Written by William Reynolds · Filed Under TOP STORIES
<!–
–>