Answering the prayers of her family and an entire city that was hoping she would come home, the 13-year-old is alive, having managed to escape her abductor three interminably long months after her parents were killed in their Wisconsin home.
Jake Thomas Patterson was sentenced to life in prison Friday after pleading guilty in March to two counts of intentional homicide and one count of kidnapping.
According to NBC News, Jayme stayed away but said in a statement read in court by attorney Chris Gramstrup: "He stole my parents from me.
He stole almost everything I loved from me. For 88 days he tried to steal me and he didn't care who he hurt or who he killed to do that. He should stay locked up forever.
"He can't take my freedom. He thought he could own me, but he was wrong. I was smarter. I watched his routine and I took back my freedom. I will always have my freedom and he will not."
"I'll just say that I would do, like, absolutely anything to take back what I did. I would die," a visibly emotional Patterson said in court. "I don't care about me, I just am sorry. That's all."
What happened to Jayme during those torturous 88 days before she was found in January is unfathomable, but the very fact that she is now with family members and on the road to recovery was an unexpectedly happy ending to this story. Most children who go missing, if they've been kidnapped by a predator, don't come back at all if they aren't found in the first 24 hours.
Not infrequently, there can be some disagreement or confusion in those critical first few hours as to whether a child has actually been abducted—and in 2018, less than 1 percent of 25,000 missing-children cases that involved law enforcement were categorized as nonfamily abductions, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
But there was no misunderstanding about the scene that greeted law enforcement in the early morning hours of Oct. 15, 2018.
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