Sayreville boy found after only minutes
Friday, October 21, 2005
BY SABA ALI
Star-Ledger Staff
The call came in Wednesday morning to the Central Jersey Technical Rescue Team, seeking their assistance in searching for a 10-year-old Sayreville boy who had been missing since Monday.
With weather forecasters predicting temperatures would dip below 50 degrees, searchers were worried that Manuel "Manny" Vargas would not survive the night.
By 7:30 p.m., less than a half- hour after a team of five K-9 units began searching, the boy was found alive but unconscious under the deck of a neighbor's home.
"In my heart, I knew he was alive," said Valerie Mokides, whose dog, Lara, found Manny. "We started banging on the back door, yelling, 'The child is under your deck.'"
The boy was taken to Raritan Bay Medical Center in Perth Amboy, where he was admitted and remained through late yesterday in good condition, hospital spokeswoman Donna Sellmann said.
His parents, Manuel and Dawn Vargas, did not want to speak to the media yesterday, Sellmann said.
The boy was reported missing around 7:30 p.m. Monday by his parents, who told police they believed he ran away after an argument over a school progress report.
A neighbor, Cyndi Laughlin, said the parents had taken away video game privileges because of the progress report.
The Vargas house on Thompson Place backs up to a wooded area with two detention ponds, one still holding water from recent rains. Washed up on the edge of the pond yesterday were more than 50 water bottles, soda cans, soda bottles and beer cans.
"Police told us they went through our yard. They had dogs go through our backyard," Laughlin said. "We have a larger lot than others here. We know kids hang out in the back," she said.
Beyond the ponds is a dirt and stone trail partially overgrown with weeds and the remains of railroad tracks that once went through the area.
After crossing the trail, the boy would have come to a steep slope, dropping at least 15 feet to a gully 20 feet wide and covered with standing rainwater several inches deep. Beyond the gully the land rises about 5 feet to a thick line of trees.
The trees stop abruptly at the back of the professionally maintained rear yards of the homes on Scarlet Drive, where the boy crawled under the deck of a home owned by Michael and Sommer Zakrzewski, less than 800 feet from his house.
Police said they don't believe he was hiding under the deck for the entire 48-hour period he was missing.
The rescue team that eventually found the boy arrived at the Vargas house around 1 p.m. Wednesday. They began interviewing the parents and grandparents in order to build a profile, a window into Manny's world.
"Trained searchers are searching for clues. Do they have phobias? Are they scared of the darkness?," said Eric Martin, chief of the Central Jersey team and president of the Search and Rescue Council of New Jersey.
They learned that Manny was not that active. He possibly would not have ventured out that far or that quickly. But he was not scared of the dark or much else. Because of his weight, he probably was not a fence climber and would be "bedding down," Martin said.
But, most of all, because he was so young and did not have friends in the area to hide him, Manny would not travel out of the area in which he was familiar, Martin said. They had decided to focus on a 1.6-mile-radius around the house.
Having set up the radius, Martin and other members did a walk around the house itself, where the grandparents had found some of Manny's clothing that he must have dropped in the haste to leave and a footprint that fit that of a boy's size and age, Martin said.
Now they had a direction.
With volunteers on foot, horses and all-terrain vehicles, a National Guard helicopter flying above already combing the area, the five K- 9 units began their search at 7 p.m.
"If you set the dog up right, coordination is perfect, all the resources are in the right areas, the search can be over quickly," Mokides said.
Mokides said that it was not just her dog, but the entire team that found Manny that night.
"I'm was definitely not alone out there. ... The whole team was working together," she said about those who worked on mapping out the areas needing to be searched to the actual volunteers doing the searching.
Mokides started training Lara eight years ago for search and rescue.
"I love working with dogs and plus there is the medical aspect as well," said Mokides, is also a pediatrician on Long Island, where she lives.
She joined the New Jersey Search and Rescue Team in Bergen County four years ago because of the team's expertise and resources. Teams consist of "ground- pounders" or those who search on foot, mounted searchers, and ATV searchers. She has taken part in 14 searches in the tristate area.
"They had a wide range of (search-and-rescue) techniques -- ropes, navigators, canines, they had groundpounders -- you could learn everything," she said about the team. "It was a team that worked together and trained together really well."
Lara, who works without a leash, darted outside Mokides' search area after picking up the boy's scent. The dog began scratching at the ground by the deck, which is surrounded by lattice.
Mokides and Sayreville volunteer firefighter Jody Somers looked under the deck and saw the boy. She said they called out his name, but he did not respond.
After trying to find a way under the deck, they decided to take the lattice apart and found the boy.
It was exactly the outcome Mokides and other searchers had hoped for.
"My way of doing this is telling myself this is the area the child is in, we have to look under every rock, everything because the child is in this area," she said. "That has to be your attitude."
Staff writers Tom Haydon and Sharon Adarlo contributed to this report.