The Ouachita County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that on Monday they were alerted to a three-year-old boy wandering along a road in Camden, Arkansas.

Nathan Greeley, a Lieutenant with Ouachita’s detective criminal investigation division, told the magazine that after finding him, they began to investigate who he was and where he had come from.

“All we knew was that the boy had a whole bunch of scratches and scrapes from head to toe. He looked like someone who had crawled through a bunch of thorns.”

He had been missing for days along with his mother, Lisa Holliman, and one-year-old brother. The family added that they had last heard from Lisa on Thursday or Friday, the week before.

After receiving that information, police began a search of the area where Kylen was found. It’s there where they found a car wreckage in a nearby ravine. Lisa’s body was found outside of the vehicle.

Nathan said about what might have happened, “it appeared she had been ejected for the vehicle and she had been deceased for quite some time. The vehicle was turned on its side, and we found a 1-year-old child still in the child restraint, still alive.”

Police believe that after the accident, Kylen managed to get himself out of his car seat, climbed out of the car and began to wander the area before he was found 300 yards from the accident. They also suspects that the two boys were in the car for up to three or four days without food or water.

“If it weren’t for him getting out of the vehicle, it would have been a horrible situation and we probably would be looking at three deaths as a result of that accident,” Nathan adds. “You can imagine, both of them were traumatized. They had one hell of a stay down there.”

While the boys may have lost a parent, Nathan believes it’s a miracle they survived. “All I can say is, in the 11 years that I’ve been here, I have never seen something so tragic and amazing at the same time,” he said. “It’s tragic for the loss of the mother, but it’s nothing short of a miracle that the boy was able to escape. At the end of the day, that boy is the hero who saved his brother.”