Make A Search Function Work In A Listbox Full Of Onchange Tags?

I've got this listbox full of hundreds of employee names. Clicking on a name executes a function using onchange. Because of the length of the list I decided a search function would be really handy and I finally found one that works.

Now the search function, when you type in the input box, scrolls the list to the first matching entry. And that's good, that's what I wanted.

The problem comes in when you try to click on the name the search function found. Nothing happens ofcourse because the onchange tag in the list reacts to changes, not direct clicks.

code:

The list is populated by java but for testing I disabled the function that clears the "Loading" option and I set it to selected. That way the loading option is highlighted by default and the search function is free to highlight something else, then when I click on the search result it works like it's supposed to.

But keeping a highlighted option at the top of the list for that sole purpose isn't very elegant, especially since if you click on it the onchange function tries to execute and generates errors. The only solution I can think of is to use java to generate another option way at the bottom of the list that has the selected attribute but I don't quite know how to do that.