Missing Orange Girl Found [Update]

At 10:46 a.m. a passing motorist noticed something unusual in an dilapidated old farm stand at the corner of Indian River and Prindle Hill roads.

The unidentified woman turned her car around and took another look and when she realized that the movement she saw was the blonde hair of someone who shouldn't be in such a place, and immediately called police.

Officer Jude Fedorchuck, a 20-year veteran of the Orange Police Department was dispatched to the area and checked it out.

He looked inside a hole in the side of the garage and saw a little blonde girl with a bandana on her head and asked her to come out. She gathered her belongings and walked outside.

"I asked for her name and she said, 'Isabella,'" he said. "I asked if she'd eaten and she said she had pop tarts and granola bars. She had her coat and blankets. She was very quiet."

"I am a father, so I am very relieved," he said.

The discovery came moments before a scheduled press conference at the Congregational Church on the Town Green, where the press waited for any tidbit of information they could get about the case. 

When Gagne announced that this was not what they expected to say.

One reporter asked what the cost to the town was for the extensive three day search with (helicopters, airplanes, search dogs, the FBI and other agencies).

Gagne answered, "We're not going to think about that right now."

First Selectman Jim Zeoli told Orange Patch his answer would have been, "What is the value of a child's life?"

Aside from finding Isabella, the one thing every news agency was waiting for was the opportunity to hear from her parents. That moment came in front of the police department when her visibly exhausted father, Roman Oleschuk stepped up to the microphone and thanked everyone for taking time away from their own families to help his.

"Isabella comes from a loving, supportive family that raised her with Christian core values. While at my home, helping investigators find leads, all I had to do was look out my window and see hundreds of people searching in the wooded areas and my own backyard with aircraft up above," he said.

"You took time away from your families. All of the folks represented up here today, all of the fire departments, myself being a firefighter, I know they all took time from their jobs and families and anything else and knowing they have been there day and night. The waiting lists to help teams that were already out there, on deck to take over where somebody else left off."

"Also, looking out my window, knowing that there were neighbors and friends taking time away from their families to help. God bless you all," Oleschuk said. "Isabella's safe."

Gagne said no one else was with Isabella, she was in the farm stand, which is 3 1/2 miles from her Derby Avenue home, the entire time, and she was running out of food.

"She had no idea that all of this was going on," Gagne said.