KAMAS, Utah – After surviving four days lost in Utah’s rugged wilderness, 11-year-old Brennan Hawkins had to satisfy some basic needs: eating, drinking and playing video games.
Brennan, who had been missing since he vanished from a Boy Scout camp on Friday, was found alive and in good condition Tuesday, ending a massive rescue effort.
The boy had no provisions with him when he disappeared and eagerly scarfed granola bars and guzzled bottles of water offered by rescuers. Later, he asked to play a video game on a cell phone that belonged to a volunteer who helped in the search.
Sheriff Dave Edmunds said Brennan was “a little dehydrated, a little weak, but other than that, he was in very good health.”
The youngster from the Salt Lake City suburb of Bountiful was found just before noon near Lily Lake, about five miles from the camp in the Uinta Mountains where he was last seen. He was reunited with his parents and their four other children and taken to a hospital to be checked.
The boy and his family rode in an ambulance together. “He laughed on the way here, just like he always has,” his mother, Jody Hawkins, told reporters when the family arrived at Primary Children’s Medical Center.
With a towel around his neck, Brennan waved to reporters as he was unloaded from the ambulance.
“People say that the heavens are closed and God no longer answers prayers. We are here to unequivocally tell you that the heavens are not closed, prayers are answered and children come home,” she said.
The hospital planned to keep him at least overnight to run tests, said Dr. Ed Clark, the hospital’s medical director.
Officials said Brennan disappeared somewhere along a dirt road between the camp’s artificial climbing wall and the “chow hall,” where he was to meet a friend.
Wanted to eat
The search was becoming more grim as it entered its fourth day, but the sheriff said the nights had been warm, with temperatures falling only into the 50s. The area is about 100 miles northeast of Salt Lake City.
It was not immediately clear how he survived or whether he tried to find his way back to camp. “He was in no mood to give us some details,” Edmunds said. “He just wanted to eat and see his mom.”
Edmunds said investigators will wait until the boy has had time to recover before questioning him.
Kay Godfrey, a spokeswoman for the Boy Scouts’ Great Salt Lake Council, pronounced the boy’s rescue a “modern-day miracle.”
Thousands of searchers – many of them volunteers – had scoured the area for the boy, using long poles to probe a swollen river.
Volunteer Forrest Nunley, a 43-year-old house painter from Salt Lake City, said he found Brennan “standing in the middle of the trail. He was all muddy and wet.”
The boy saw some volunteer searchers on horseback, but, “He didn’t want to come out. He was too scared. He was a little delirious. I sat him down and gave him a little food,” Nunley said.
During the search, rescuers feared the boy had fallen into a river that was swollen by heavy snow melt.
The East Fork of the Bear River is within 100 yards of the road where the boy was believed to have been walking. Deep-water rescue teams searched the river, while others combed the rugged area around it.
On Monday, rescuers found three socks and a sandal in the river, but none belonged to Brennan.
The boys’ parents also sifted fruitlessly through enough clothing collected from the mountains to fill the bed of a pickup.
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