Cleveland Man Makes Harrowing Discovery While Driving

CLEVELAND, Tenn. (WDEF) – A Cleveland man was driving to work last Friday when he made a startling discovery.

Danny Hitson was heading to work along Villa Drive in Northwestern Cleveland unusually early last Friday. It was 5:30 in the morning, before the sun had even risen.

But what he saw as he came around a corner will forever stick with him.

The area along Villa Drive in Cleveland where Hitson says he found a girl alone.

Hitson said, “I cross the little bridge at Candy’s Creek, and I notice something to my right at the woods line, and I thought it was a kid.”

In the pitch dark of the early morning, Hitson says his initial fear was realized of a little girl standing all alone next to a busy road.

He says that there were no adults nearby with the child, and that she was only wearing a diaper.

Hitson immediately pulled over near the Westwood Baptist Church and Vintage Apartment Complex.

He said, “She stepped out into the road when I got out of the car, and I said, “Come here baby”, and she came running to me. Put her in the car, and then we pulled off the road where we would be safe and called 911.”

Hitson says he found the girl perilously close to Villa Drive, a busy residential street in the northwestern part of Cleveland.

He added, “She was standing in an opening, feet from the road.”

Hitson said, “People fly up and down that road, they act like it’s a racetrack.”

He says that Cleveland Police and EMS came to check on the child and found that she was uninjured.

There were many dangers the girl could have run into in the area that could have caused a different outcome. 

There is a creek feet away from where she was found that Hitson says is very deep and could have resulted in the girl drowning.

Additionally, there is ongoing construction along nearby Georgetown Road that would have posed dangers to her as well.

Hitson said, “It eat me up all day long because I thought about my kids, and I thought about this little girl that had been out there in the dark all night long, or who knows how long she’d been out there.”

Hitson says he doesn’t normally go to work that early in the morning, but says it had to be divine intervention he had to go in early on Friday.

He said, “I don’t even know the little girl’s name. I just know that all kids are precious and I’m glad I found her before someone bad could happen to her.”

We did reach out to the Cleveland Police Department to see if there’s an investigation into the incident.

We have not yet heard back from them.

Hitson urges everyone that if they see a child out of place at an unusual time, make sure to report it to authorities.