Last month, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children released an age-progressed photo of a 10-year-old South Dakota girl who vanished from a children’s home in 2019.
Inforum reported that Serenity Dennard would be 14 today. Dennard purportedly ran away from the Black Hills Children’s Home in Rockerville in February 2019.
The children’s home reportedly provides treatment to 4- to 14-year-olds who have experienced abuse, trauma, or mental and behavioral health issues. Dennard’s legal guardians said they enrolled Dennard in the inpatient program because she had behavioral issues due to being removed from her biological parents’ care and being placed with numerous foster families, according to the Journal.
Police initially classified their search as a recovery mission because of the freezing temperatures at the time Dennard disappeared. Dennard also vanished without winter clothing.
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Two employees were reportedly watching Dennard and three other children as they played in the facility’s gym when one of the children ran away. Dennard was said to have taken off while one of the employees pursued the other child.
Two months after Dennard vanished, multiple dog teams reportedly detected a cadaver scent in the vicinity where the 9-year-old was last seen. Despite this, Pennington County police announced in January 2021 that they were discontinuing their search due to a lack of new leads.
Investigators reportedly fielded 275 leads in Dennard’s unsolved disappearance while more than 66 agencies logged 6,000 miles while looking for the girl.
“This is another investigative tool in an open and active investigation,” Mueller told Inforrum. “Although the physical search has been exhausted, we follow up on all leads as we look for answers in this painful and difficult missing person case.”
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[Feature image: Serenity Dennard/Pennington County Sheriff’s Office, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children]
