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Missing Boy Scout Found Alive in Utah

Posted on: Wednesday, 22 June 2005, 03:00 CDT

KAMAS, Utah -- The 11-year-old boy who wandered lost for four days in the Utah wilderness apparently managed to elude thousands of searchers by defying conventional wisdom: He went up instead of down.

Brennan Hawkins was found alive and in good condition Tuesday by a 43-year-old house painter on an ATV who was out looking on his own, miles outside of active search grids.

Sheriff Dave Edmunds had earlier said Brennan would have been more likely to head down a river valley from his 530-acre Boy Scout camp deep inside a national forest.

"Typically children walk downhill, along the least path of resistance," he said.

The search was concentrated into those areas, but Brennan had hiked some 600 feet higher and more than five miles into the mountains when searcher Forrest Nunley found him before noon Thursday.

"I turned a corner and there was a kid standing in the middle of the trail. He was all muddy and wet," from walking over the saturated ground, said Nunley, who dialed 911 on his cell phone and said he was lucky to find a signal.

"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," the boy's mother, Jody Hawkins, said.

The boy had seen some volunteer searchers on horseback but avoided them because he was scared, Nunley said. "He was a little delirious. I sat him down and gave him a little food."

After downing bottles of water and eating all the granola bars carried by a group of volunteer searchers, the boy asked to play a video game on one rescuer's cell phone, the sheriff said.

The youngster from the Salt Lake City suburb of Bountiful was found on a 9,400-foot pass above Lily Lake, a summer-only campground on the Uinta mountain range. He was quickly reunited with his parents and their four other children.

The boy and his family rode in an ambulance together to Primary Children's Medical Center in Salt Lake City. "He laughed on the way here, just like he always has," his mother said.

With a towel around his neck, Brennan waved to reporters as he was unloaded from the ambulance. Doctors planned to keep him at least overnight to run tests, said Dr. Ed Clark, the hospital's medical director.

In Bountiful, an impromptu celebration was held Tuesday on the Hawkins family's front lawn.

"This is a miracle. This is how it should happen," neighbor Kristie Swain said. She and her husband, Mark, spent Sunday and Monday in the mountains helping search for Brennan.

"It shows that you don't give up. You just cannot give up," she said.

Neighbors and school children tied celebratory yellow ribbons to every part of the Hawkins' yard, the family's boat, and trees surrounding the home in the Salt Lake City suburb.

If neighbors didn't have any ribbon, they honked car horns or held up signs heralding Brennan's safe return.

The boy carried no food or water when he vanished Friday, and his family had said he did not have a good sense of direction. But the sheriff said the nights had been warm, with temperatures falling only into the 50s.

It was not yet known how the boy spent his four nights in the woods, or whether he had been trying to find his way back to camp. "He was in no mood to give us some details," the sheriff said. "He just wanted to eat and see his Mom."

The boy's safe rescue at 9,400 feet on a rocky, narrow ATV trail ended a massive search that included a platoon of all-terrain vehicles, horses and helicopters, including some armed with infrared devices.

"Words cannot express the appreciation that we feel for all that have done so much," read a message on the family's Web site. "He was worth everyone's efforts and everyone's prayers - you will always be in our prayers."

Officials said Brennan disappeared somewhere along a dirt road between the Scout camp's artificial climbing wall and the "chow hall," where he was to meet a friend.

Kay Godfrey, a spokeswoman for the Boy Scouts' Great Salt Lake Council, pronounced the boy's rescue a "modern-day miracle."

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On the Net:

http://www.findbrennan.org

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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