LEWISTON – A frantic, 20-minute search for a missing toddler Friday night ended without further drama when the child was found napping under a heap of blankets.
For those 20 minutes, more than a dozen police officers and neighbors at Pleasantview Acres searched for the 2-year-old boy known to his family as Junior.
The boy was reported missing about 7:10 p.m. and was said to be wearing only a diaper.
Police who responded found the child’s mother and grandmother screaming as they searched around the apartment cluster for the boy.
Police called for a tracking dog and began going door-to-door while emergency dispatchers were using a reverse 911 system to call others who live in the area.
In temperatures that had dropped below freezing, police, neighbors and friends of the family began searching the woods around the apartment complex off Scribner Boulevard.
They searched in between buildings and beneath cars.
Police peered into vehicles parked in the lot and checked more unlikely places, like a Dumpster and hollowed-out spaces in snowbanks.
Police learned that the boy was last seen about 6:45 p.m., meaning he had been gone a half-hour as the search got under way. More police officers had joined the search by 7:25 p.m. The voices of men and women were heard shouting for “Junior” as the search stretched on.
“My child is gone!” the mother screamed, as worried friends approached her.
Then, about 7:30 p.m., a dispatcher informed the officers that the child had been found in the apartment where a relative had been baby-sitting him.
“We got him! We got him,” a woman who lives in the apartment shouted from her doorway.
Police said Junior was found sleepy but unharmed as they searched the apartment for the third time.
“He was under the blankets on the couch,” said police Cpl. Tim Darnell. “We almost sat on him, in fact.”
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