Saw this on Drudge:

Six-year-old hero of the evacuation

Hurricane rescuers found seven children wandering together at an evacuation point in central New Orleans.

The oldest, a six-year-old boy, appeared to be their leader. He carried a five-month-old in his arms, followed by five infants. All were holding hands.

The children’s desperate parents had handed them up to a rescue helicopter after four days spent trapped in their flooded home without food, light or air conditioning, and no milk for the baby.

The crew who took the terrified children promised to be back to collect the parents in 25 minutes. They did not return.

In the midst of all the terrible stories of human depravity swirling in the aftermath of Katrina, there are, thankfully, stories like this one.

Catrina Williams - at first rescuers refused to believe Deamonte when he told them his mother’s name - had seen her children’s pictures on missingkids.com, a website set up by the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. The next day, a private aircraft took the children to Texas for an emotional reunion. Mrs Williams, 26, told the newspaper that sheer desperation led her to hand over the children to rescuers first and agree to wait behind. “We did what we had to do for our kids, because we love them.”

The parents were eventually taken to Texas but with no news about the children’s whereabouts.

Reports from parents of missing children are flooding in, said Mike Kenner, of the centre, which has been asked by the United States Justice Department to co-ordinate a missing persons process. With crowds choking staging posts for evacuees, many have become separated from their sons and daughters.

In one case, a woman handed her baby up on to a bus only to turn back for her suitcase and find the bus already gone.

The International Committee of the Red Cross website for Katrina victims has almost 100,000 people trying to trace family members missing since the hurricane. Overnight, the number of entries on the family links site rose from 65,000 to 94,000, a spokesman said yesterday. On the missing kids.com, the faces of the seven children were yesterday still visible, some smiling, the younger ones bemused or on the verge of tears.

But theirs is one of the happy stories - over their pictures, unlike all the others surrounding them, is stamped the word “resolved”.

What a brave little guy. Well done Deamonte!