A two-year-old girl was found safe Sunday night after she had been missing for 27 hours in the Carman area of southern Manitoba.
Kaitlyn Waldner, from the Brentwood Hutterite Colony near Oakville, disappeared Saturday evening while visiting relatives on the Rose Valley Hutterite Colony, about 60 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg.
'We asked her where she slept and she said, "[I] slept on the grass and I cried."'-Clara Waldner, girl's grandmother
More than 250 volunteers, police, rescue workers, search dogs and horseback riders searched for the child for more than a day before two teenage girls found her around 9 p.m. Sunday.
The girl was lying asleep in a field of waist-high rye slightly more than a kilometre away from the Rose Valley Colony.
"She said she cried," Clara Waldner, the girl's grandmother, told CBC News Monday morning. "We asked her where she slept and she said, '[I] slept on the grass and I cried.'"
RCMP say the toddler was healthy and calm when she was located. She was wearing the dress and bonnet she had been wearing when she disappeared and was using her light nylon jacket as a pillow.
Searchers had feared the worst when searching for the girl. Thunderstorms had passed through the area Saturday night, bringing heavy rain, lightning and high winds. A river also runs through the area where she was found.
Before Kaitlyn was found, searchers had combed the area three times with no success. At 3 p.m. Sunday the police search was scaled back, but some volunteers and relatives continued to look.