The Day He Got Out

This had never happened before.

I want to start with that, because I know how the rest of this story sounds without it. Until that morning, Rocco had never tried to leave the house on his own. He had never opened a door he wasn't meant to open. We knew he needed supervision, and we gave him supervision. We didn't know he needed this.

The story actually starts the day before.

The Day Before

My daughter was on her way out through the garage. There wasn't a clear rule yet about who closed the door behind us — it just hadn't come up. The door stayed open, and Rocco ran out behind her.

By the time he hit the park next to our house he was about ten metres ahead of me, running in the direction of the main road. I caught him in time. Just.

It had never happened before. We talked about it as a family that night. We thought we'd dealt with it. We didn't realise that was just a taste of what was coming the next morning.

6:30 in the Morning

I was in the bathroom. Brushing my teeth, washing my face. The usual stuff.

In the background I could hear what sounded like our little blue step being dragged across the floor — the step with the green dots that we'd bought years ago to help Rocco reach things and get up onto the toilet. It wasn't a normal sound. But Kirsty was still in bed, and I figured my daughter was up and had nudged it with her foot. That step gets in the way sometimes. People bump it. It makes a noise. I didn't think anything of it.

I came out of our bedroom maybe a minute or two later.

The Garage Door Was Wide Open

Our bedroom door is almost directly opposite the door to the garage. I walked out, and I saw it. The door to the garage was open, and through it, I could see the garage door itself was wide open too.

I froze for ten or twenty seconds. I just stood there. Then I ran into the garage, then ran back into the house to check Rocco's bedroom — some part of me still hoping it was my daughter for some strange reason, that she'd opened it. His bed was empty.

I ran outside and looked in every direction. I couldn't see him anywhere.

That was the worst feeling of my life.

40 Minutes

We live in a community with a lot of waterways. I ran in the direction I'd seen him go the day before, down the street, looking everywhere. Nothing. I ran home as fast as I could. I had to go through to Kirsty in the bedroom and tell her our son was gone, and I didn't know where.

She started driving one way. I started driving another. We spoke to a couple of the gardeners working in our area, and they got on their walkie-talkies to each other — there are a few of them working through the community — and they all started looking.

The whole time, one thought kept coming back to me. Rocco is non-verbal. Even if someone found him and brought him inside their house to keep him safe, he couldn't tell them his name. He couldn't tell them who his mum and dad were. He couldn't tell them where he lived. No one would know.

40 minutes is what it took. It felt like three days.

One of the gardeners had actually seen him earlier and hadn't thought anything of it — a boy walking on his own in pyjamas, but not in distress. Nothing that triggered alarm. When the radio call came through, he said yeah, I saw a kid like that, he's standing outside someone's house on the other side of the community.

That's where we found him.

After He Was Home

The relief doesn't hit the way you'd think it would. What hits is the weight of how easily it could have gone the other way — the waterways, the main road, the 40 minutes he was out there in his pyjamas with no way to ask anyone for help. The fact that we were asleep through the start of it.

I felt like the worst parent in the world. As a dad I struggled with that for weeks afterwards. I wasn't sleeping properly. Every noise in the night woke me up. Other kids come in and out of doors — that's normal — but every sound my brain was processing as Rocco getting out again.

Kirsty was carrying the same weight. We didn't talk about it much in those first weeks. We were both just trying to get through.

What We Built

I came to one conclusion in the days after. This could never happen again. Even though it had never happened before. At any cost.

So we made changes. I'll list them honestly, because if there's another family reading this thinking about their own home, I want them to see exactly what we did.

What Rocco had done was drag the step from the bathroom all the way through the house, into the garage, through the internal door. He stood on the step, and that made him tall enough to reach the garage door button on the wall. He pressed it. The big garage door opened. And he walked out. I still don't know how we didn't hear the motor running. We just didn't.

Here's what we changed:

• The garage door button on the wall has been removed entirely.
• Our car keys, which have a fob to open the garage door, now live in the tallest cupboard in the house. Rocco can't reach them even on a step.
• The internal door from the house to the garage now has a key code entry.
• We've added a smart plug to the garage door motor. To open the garage door now, you have to enter the code on the internal door AND switch the smart plug on through an app on your phone, which only works through facial recognition.

It probably sounds extreme. It is extreme. But in my head now there's a layer for every way Rocco could try to get out, and each layer protects the next one. Even if he got through the internal door — which he shouldn't, because he doesn't know the code — the garage door button doesn't exist anymore. Even if he found the keys — which he shouldn't, because they're too high — the motor is on a smart plug that needs my face to switch on.

That's where we are now.

What I Want Other Parents to Know

If you're reading this and your child has never tried to leave the house — neither had Rocco, until the day before that morning.

Elopement. That's the word, apparently. I didn't even know it was a thing until afterwards, when I went looking for what had just happened to us and found out there was a name for it. Nobody had warned us properly. Or maybe they had and I hadn't heard it, because until your child does it you can't picture your child doing it.

I'm not writing this to scare anyone. I'm writing it because I wish I'd read it before that morning. Because the day before isn't always a warning. Sometimes it is, but you only know that in hindsight.

If there's anything to take from this story, it's this: the systems you put in place don't have to be a response to something that's already happened. They can just exist because you've thought about what's possible.

We were lucky. Rocco came home. He was standing outside a stranger's house in his pyjamas and they hadn't even noticed him yet, but he was safe.

The next family might not be that lucky. That's why I'm writing this.

Rocco is seven. He's still non-verbal. He still doesn't know our address or our phone number or our names. We're working on all of it. But on the morning of the day he got out, he didn't know any of it. And he still walked out the door.

It's been months since that morning. Kirsty and I still wake up to noises in the night. The smart plug is still in place. The button is still off the wall. This is just our life now.