Fifty Yards Into the Cold: The Disappearance of Serenity June Dennard

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

July 27, 2024

Serenity June Dennard was nine years old on February 3, 2019, living at the Black Hills Children's Home, a residential treatment facility off Old Rockerville Road roughly twenty miles southwest of Rapid City, South Dakota. She was small, standing somewhere between four foot seven and four foot nine and weighing about ninety six pounds, with blonde hair and blue eyes. Serenity had spent time in foster care after being removed from her biological parents, moving through multiple foster placements before eventually being adopted. Her adoptive father later described her as carrying severe reactive attachment disorder and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, conditions rooted in the trauma of her early childhood, and by the time she was nine those struggles had become significant enough that her adoptive parents placed her at Black Hills Children's Home in July 2018, enrolling her in an inpatient treatment program built for children between the ages of four and fourteen dealing with trauma and behavioral health challenges.

Serenity had a documented history of running away, including at least one earlier attempt to escape from the facility itself, an attempt that staff had managed to catch and stop before she got far. She also reportedly made threats at times to run away or to hurt herself, the kind of behavioral warning signs that should have made staff at a facility built specifically to treat children like her especially alert to exactly the situation that unfolded on February 3, 2019, Super Bowl Sunday.

Out the Gym Door

That morning, Serenity was in the facility's gymnasium along with several other resident children and two staff members supervising them. At around 10:45 in the morning, in the middle of that supervised activity, Serenity suddenly ran out of the gym. Staff members saw her go but did not physically follow her out the door, instead calling for help in hopes that someone else could intercept her before she got far. It did not work. Witnesses and a visitor to the property later reported spotting Serenity roughly fifty yards north of the facility's entrance, walking along Rockerville Road, headed away from the building.

The weather that day made her escape especially dangerous. The temperature stood at around thirteen degrees Fahrenheit, and Serenity was wearing only a gray long sleeved shirt, sweatpants, and snow boots, with no coat, no gloves, and no hat, nothing that could have protected her from sustained exposure to that kind of cold for any real length of time. Despite that, staff at the facility did not call 911 until 12:26 that afternoon, roughly an hour and forty one minutes after Serenity had first bolted from the gym.

A Delay Investigators Called Unreasonable

The gap between Serenity's disappearance and that 911 call became one of the most scrutinized elements of the entire case. According to the timeline that later emerged, staff contacted an on call supervisor at home after Serenity ran, and that supervisor advised them to keep searching on their own for another fifteen minutes before escalating to emergency services. When the supervisor personally arrived at the facility roughly eighty minutes after being notified, 911 still had not been called, and it was only then, with the supervisor now on scene, that authorities were finally contacted to report Serenity as a runaway.

In the investigation that followed, South Dakota's Department of Social Services and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services both examined the facility's handling of the incident. Their findings were blunt. Investigators concluded that Black Hills Children's Home had not provided the level of supervision Serenity's documented history required, that the facility lacked an adequate emergency preparedness plan for exactly this kind of situation, that staff's initial search effort had been disorganized, and that the full hundred and one minute delay before calling 911 did not qualify, in the state's own language, as a reasonable amount of time to wait before seeking outside help for a missing nine year old in freezing temperatures. Regulators also found that staff had initially misrepresented the timeline to investigators, claiming for a time that 911 had been contacted immediately rather than nearly two hours after Serenity ran. The facility was ordered to take corrective action in response to the findings, part of a broader reckoning with how a program built specifically to care for high risk children had failed to prevent, or promptly respond to, exactly the kind of crisis it existed to manage. Despite those findings, a review of state and federal court records turned up no pending lawsuit connected to the case, and a spokesperson for the organization that runs the facility has confirmed no litigation or settlement has ever been filed.

An Enormous Search That Found Nothing

Once the search for Serenity was underway in earnest, it grew into one of the largest missing persons search efforts the region has seen. Over time, more than a thousand people collectively logged in excess of four thousand miles searching on foot and by other means, supported by ninety one search dogs and their handlers and seven aircraft conducting aerial searches over the surrounding terrain. Investigators eventually documented 220 separate search operations involving sixty six different agencies, covering more than five thousand miles of ground in total, alongside interviews with more than five hundred people connected to the case in one way or another.

Within days of Serenity's disappearance, given the brutal cold and her lack of appropriate winter clothing, authorities publicly acknowledged shifting the effort from an active search for a living child to what they described as a recovery mission, a grim but honest reflection of how slim the odds of finding her alive had become given the conditions. About two months after she vanished, cadaver dogs reportedly detected a scent consistent with human remains in the area, though that finding ultimately proved inconclusive and led to no confirmed discovery.

Still Open, Still Waiting

Investigators have said repeatedly that they have found no evidence suggesting Serenity was abducted, and the case has never developed a clear suspect or a specific alternate theory beyond the straightforward, devastating possibility that a nine year old girl with a documented history of impulsive, dangerous behavior ran into freezing weather without proper clothing and did not survive the exposure, her remains simply never located across the wooded, rugged terrain surrounding the facility. Pennington County Sheriff's Office Captain Dustin Morrison, speaking years after the disappearance, described the weight the unresolved case continues to carry for everyone involved, saying it weighs on people to this day, that investigators have not been able to provide the closure Serenity's family deserves, and that they continue to hope they will be able to do so eventually.

The case remains open and active more than five years later, with investigators continuing to receive tips on a weekly or monthly basis and saying they follow up immediately on anything that seems credible, having already run down more than 357 individual leads submitted from locations around the world. An age progressed image created by investigators shows what Serenity might look like today, a visual reminder of a life that, if she survived whatever happened that February morning, has continued somewhere beyond the reach of everyone still searching for her.

Anyone with information about Serenity June Dennard's disappearance is asked to contact the Pennington County Sheriff's Office at 605-394-6115.

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