Andjela Djuraskovic Recalls Son's Disappearance in Park

Andjela Djuraskovic, host of Prva TV’s morning show, today described for the first time, in detail, how her two-year-old son Dusan briefly disappeared a few days ago. She spoke about it on Prva’s morning program on September 1, admitting that those minutes remained etched in her memory.

Djuraskovic has two sons, Mihajlo and Dusan, four years apart. She says the age gap means the younger boy doesn’t always follow his older brother’s interests, and that this, she says, was one of the reasons she lost sight of him for a moment.

How the Search Began

“That is every mother’s worst nightmare,” Djuraskovic said on Prva’s morning show, adding that the two of them went off in different directions in the park, while Dusan called out for his mother to watch him climb on the playground equipment.

Here, however, her two accounts of the same event diverge. In the statement given today, September 1, Djuraskovic described an afternoon outing, saying, “We went out to the little park in the afternoon, like we do every day.” In a social media post from August 25, when she first wrote about the same event, she said the disappearance happened in the evening, ahead of a storm gathering over Belgrade, writing, “Tonight, ahead of a storm that was brewing over Belgrade, my two-year-old son went missing.” Her two descriptions, then, disagree on whether it happened in the afternoon or in the evening.

According to today’s account, when she noticed Dusan was gone, she asked her older son Mihajlo if he knew where his brother was. He told her Dusan might have gone to get a toy, a crocodile they had brought along on the walk, which the toddler had thrown near the river. It all happened on the riverside promenade.

The length of the search itself also differs between the two accounts. On today’s morning show, Djuraskovic said that after fifteen minutes she was so desperate that she called the police. “Those 15 minutes felt to me like five hours had passed,” she said. In her August 25 post, however, she wrote that the search lasted around half an hour.

Around her, she said, thirty to forty people gathered, mostly parents who happened to be in the park with their own children that day. Dusan was eventually found by two young men, aged 16 and 17.

Did Police Arrive Before or After?

Here, too, the two accounts differ. On Prva’s morning show, Djuraskovic said police arrived within about ten minutes. “I have to say the police arrived within about ten minutes, I was terribly ashamed in front of them,” she said, adding that Dusan was found a minute or two after police showed up. In the August 25 post, however, she wrote that her son was found before police arrived on the scene.

In that same social media post, Djuraskovic also described the role played by passersby. According to her, alongside the parents from the park, strangers who happened to be passing through also joined the search. The two young men who found the boy told her, as she recounted at the time, “Ma’am, don’t cry. We’re all going to spread out now and look.” She publicly thanked them again today, saying she hadn’t had the chance to properly repay them before.

Despite the discrepancies between her two accounts, one thing matches in both versions: the boy was found safe, with no consequences, and both times Djuraskovic stressed how endless those minutes of uncertainty felt to her.