For more than 36 hours, rescue workers combed the banks and tangled logjams of the Kankakee River, searching for Hannah Klamecki and her grandfather, missing since Wednesday evening.
When they found the body of David Klamecki, 62, about 9:30 a.m. Friday, it seemed foolish to hold out hope his 5-year-old granddaughter was still alive.
But more than two hours later, a little girl — naked, scratched and bug-bitten — walked out of the woods into the rescue staging area holding a handful of raspberries.
Kankakee County Chief Deputy Ken McCabe said another searcher saw her and said, “‘What’s that little girl doing?’
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“I said, ‘Are you OK?’ And she said something about Grandpa going swimming, and I said, ‘What’s your name?’ and she said, ‘Hannah.’ So I scooped her up and took her to the truck. She was pretty calm, very matter-of-fact.”
McCabe, on the other hand, an 11-year veteran of the department with children of his own, was crying.
Hannah picked the unripe raspberries, in hopes her grandmother could use them to make the pancakes she likes. She was naked because her “swimmies” got wet.
A few miles away, the girl’s exhausted parents, Mike and Carol Klamecki, waited with Mike Klamecki’s mother, Sheila, at his parents’ cottage in the Garden of Eden subdivision on the outskirts of Momence.
Dozens of searchers from local police and fire departments had been searching nearly nonstop, but Mike Klamecki, pastor at New Hope Community Church in Villa Park, was just getting ready to go out and wander the woods himself, do something — anything — to help find his daughter.
When the phone rang about 11 a.m., the family braced for the worst. That’s when they learned that Hannah was sitting in an ambulance, eating a banana.
“All [Thursday] night, we didn’t know what to do — we were just praying,” Klamecki said. “And everyone feared the worst when we found Dad, and then when we got there, it was unbelievable, sheer amazement — she literally walked right into their arms.”
“We had an intensive prayer session this morning, and we were very specific — we asked God to bring her back today,” Sheila Klamecki said. “Not 20 minutes later, the fire chief called and said they found her and she was alive.”
A few hours later, Hannah was sleeping in a hospital bed at Riverside Medical Center in Kankakee, where she was treated for cuts and scrapes and mild dehydration. She was released about 4:30 p.m.
“There were two miracles: that she would survive [the water], and then was able to survive 35 to 40 hours in the woods,” Kankakee County Sheriff Tim Bukowski said. “It was very hot and humid. We’re lucky she didn’t dehydrate.”
“We got an awful happy ending on today’s job,” said Momence Fire Chief Dave Horn. “We all knew we shouldn’t have had a recovery.”
Hannah’s mother said the girl and her grandfather went to Whirlpool Point, a small beach on an island about three-quarters of a mile west of the Illinois state line where they often swam. Just yards downstream, powerful whirlpools form at the confluence of the river and a smaller, slower-moving side channel.
Hannah told her that her grandfather secured the boat, and she started playing on the beach. Then they swam for a while, and she remembered that he pushed her and she couldn’t see where he went, her mother said. The girl floated a short distance until her water-wings caught on a branch and she pulled herself to shore.
“I asked her if she could see grandpa or the boat, and she said no, and then she walked into the woods to find grandma’s house,” said Carol Klamecki. “She didn’t know where it was, but she thought she would find it.”
“That’s the bitter part about the whole thing,” Mike Klamecki said. “My dad was all about the river. He loved the river, and he and Hannah were best friends — they were river rats.
“My dad spent his last minutes in the best way ever, on the river with his best friend, and probably the fact that the river took him wouldn’t bother him that much. I like to think he did everything in his power to save Hannah before he went down.”
For David Klamecki, living on the river was living the dream, and the dream was at its best when he was with his granddaughter. He spent his life working in the steel mills in Chicago, a tough South Side Pole, but he changed dramatically in September 2000, his family said.
Carol Klamecki gave birth to their first child, a son named Sam, on Sept. 11, 2000. He died the next day.
“That really changed him,” his son said. “It made him open up to spiritual things, changed him from a hard steel man to someone who appreciated life more.”
“He always loved his family, but after Sam died, he was able to show it more,” said Carol Klamecki. When Hannah came along a year later, “she was like a miracle baby.”
David Klamecki retired early, and he and his wife moved from their South Holland home to the cottage on the banks of the river.
“He decided life was too short to waste, and he quit his job and we moved down here,” his wife said. “My husband, we’re going to miss him, but it’s tempered by the joy that I won’t lose another grandchild. I already lost one, and I don’t want to lose another.”
He was always on the river: fishing, picking up trash and unsticking logjams, she said. His death is puzzling to his family, because he knew the river well and knew the danger of Whirlpool Point. Both Sheila and Mike wonder whether he suffered a heart attack or some other physical problem that caused him to try to push his granddaughter to safety. An autopsy was scheduled for Sunday.
As of Friday afternoon, Hannah didn’t yet know that her grandfather had died.
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“She hasn’t asked about it, and we don’t know exactly what that means,” Mike Klamecki said. “As she remembers more, other things might come up, and we have to have a funeral. We’ll have to tell her what happened, and we’ll make it as positive as possible.”
On Father’s Day weekend, even as the family mourned a death, they said they were grateful to God for bringing Hannah safely home and for giving them the strength to endure the heartache.
And they were grateful to all the people who searched for Hannah. “I can’t give these guys enough respect for their diligence,” Sheila Klamecki said of the rescuers. “I just assumed that she was with him and the next call I would get would be that they found her [dead] too. I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live, the sound of [the chief’s] voice saying, ‘We found her, she’s alive, she walked right out of the woods.'”
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mwalberg@tribune