'Miracles happen,' says mother of rescued teen

Submitted photo of Kourtney Thibeault

- Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
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Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal

Katherine Perreault speaks to the media at CMMC where her daughter Kourtney Thibeault is recovering from an accident. She was trapped in her car for two days in a ravine after going over an embankment in Topsham last week. 

- Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
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Submitted photo of Kourtney Thibeault.

- Submitted photo

Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal

Katherine Perreault speaks to the media at Central Maine Medical Center, where her daughter Kourtney Thibeault is recovering from an accident. She was trapped in her car in a ravine for two days after her car went over an embankment in Topsham last week.

- Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
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LEWISTON — In the worst moments when her 17-year-old daughter had been missing for two days, Katherine Perreault wished the girl had been abducted, if only to know she was still alive.

Perreault searched roadsides and knocked on strangers' doors, sometimes wandering into their yards to peek through garage windows. She hoped to spot the truck her daughter, Kourtney Thibeault, had been driving when she disappeared.

"You don't give up," Perreault said. "You have to keep going and going."

At almost midnight, 48 hours after the Mt. Ararat High School cheerleader disappeared, Perreault was preparing to return to the search when police called: Kourtney was alive and safe.

"Miracles happen," Perreault said Tuesday morning. Her appearance at a Central Maine Medical Center news conference marked the family's first public comment since Kourtney was found Nov. 19, battered in her dad's truck at the bottom of a ravine off Route 196 in Topsham.

On Tuesday, Kourtney was listed in critical condition at the Lewiston hospital. Her thigh bone and her jaw are broken. By the weekend she hopes to be off a breathing tube and moving around, her mother said.

The teenager is expected to make a full recovery.

"She's going to come out of this 100 percent. She's a fighter," Perreault said. "She's going to be marching down the aisle at graduation." 

'We never stopped looking'

Kourtney was on her way to her father's house in Topsham when the accident occurred.

The high school senior was taking a class at Central Maine Community College in Auburn and headed toward Topsham on Route 196. She sent her dad, Gary Thibeault, a text message at 11:36 p.m. saying she was on her way there.

Kourtney never arrived. When she didn't turn up, her father sent text messages to her. There was no answer. He called Perreault, who lives about a mile away. She'd heard nothing. A few hours later, the parents filed a missing person report with Topsham police.

"Kourtney is not the type of child who would ever take off," Perreault said. The girl is a member of the National Honor Society at school and captain of the varsity football cheerleading squad. She does her homework without prodding. "She's not a child you have to discipline at all."

Something bad had happened, she knew.

Police answered the plea. By the following day, about eight officers were spending all of their time searching. They focused their attention on a circle 2 miles across, an area along the Topsham, Lisbon and Durham lines defined by the cell phone company as the girl's location. (The searchers would later learn that Kourtney had two cell phones with her, but they were both out of her reach.)

"The phone company kept saying, 'We're getting a ping off her phone,'" Perreault said. "We never stopped looking. All day. All night. There was not a nook and cranny we didn't look in."

In the end, Topsham officer Troy Garrison, a longtime friend of Kourtney's father, found the girl in the ravine. Sgt. Mark Gilliam immediately called Perreault.

"I just started screaming," she said.

Her husband, Kourtney's stepfather, couldn't tell whether the call was good news or bad.

Swerved for a deer

The couple sped to Central Maine Medical Center.

Kourtney told her mom, "I love you." She added, "Tell Dad I'm sorry for crashing his truck."

The accident was caused by a deer in the road.

"She swerved to avoid it," Perreault said. "She remembers going off into the ditch."

Despite her breathing tube and broken jaw, Kourtney has described bits of her two-day ordeal.

"She said she kept going in and out of it," Perreault said. She had no food and little drink. She remembers waking and sipping a Dr. Pepper. She remembers waking again later and the soda had spilled everywhere.

"I knew you guys would come," she told her parents. "It was just a matter of time."

The family has been overwhelmed by the public response to the story. There have been prayers from strangers and media calls from around the country.

"It's a feel-good story," Perreault said. "It had such a good outcome."

One of them is the way Kourtney's extended family managed during the crisis.

"I really think it brought us all so close together," she said. Kourtney has two older sisters, a younger brother and a twin sister, Whitney, who has barely left her sister's bedside, Perreault said.

The mother smiled, still showing relief from last week's dark moments, and picked up a copy of Kourtney's cheerleading photo.

"That's a beautiful girl," she said.

dhartill@sunjournal.com