Boy's found with help of profile
By
KEN SERRANO
JOHN MAJESKI
and
ARIELLE LEVIN BECKER
STAFF WRITERS
kserrano@thnt.com
SAYREVILLE — With
Manny Vargas gone for nearly two days already, with the squad of police assigned to
the case getting just a few hours sleep over those two nights and with the search
going nowhere, detective Barry Eck made a fateful decision Wednesday.
Eck called in the cavalry.
The cavalry in this case was a collection of about 40 rescuers, expert in finding
lost people and picking up what some might feel are lost causes.
Among them were Passaic County sheriff's officers, some mounted.
"They brought truck after truck of ATVs. Truck after truck of horse trailers," said
Eck, also the office of emergency-management coordinator for Sayreville.
But it was the interviewing by crack rescuers of the boy's friends, teachers and
grandparents — who were with Manny when he fled — that provided a critical key: a
profile of the 10-year-old Thompson Place boy.
The searchers found out he liked to play war games on his PlayStation. They
discovered that he may have liked to play manhunt outside. And they knew Manny wasn't
a skinny, ferretlike kid who might climb a tree.
Kids like Manny like cover — a shed or under a porch, maybe.
Those interviews and other "search management" techniques led to the most probable
path of least resistance and helped solve the case.
"This wasn't luck," Eck said about finding the lost Sayreville boy Wednesday. "This
was professionalism."
Manny remained in good condition yesterday at Raritan Bay Medical Center's Perth
Amboy division. The boy was reported missing around 7:30 p.m. Monday by his family.
Authorities said he ran away following an
argument with his parents over a school progress report, escaping through a
first-floor window.
Before the expert searchers arrived, hundreds of people had already spent hours
looking for Manny.
Among them were firefighters from Sayreville's four companies, borough rescuers,
police officers and auxiliary police officers.
The first night 60 of them searched for Manny, especially in an area known as "The
Pit," an open section of raw land abandoned by a developer years ago. It is just east
of where Manny was found.
"Kids play in there," Eck said.
The volunteers walked in a line through the neighborhood around Thompson Place,
calling the boy's name.
The teams, led by borough firefighters with radios, looked under porches and in
sheds. They looked for Manny until 4 a.m. Tuesday.
Eck and the dozen or so other detectives in the bureau got an hour of sleep, then
regrouped.
On Tuesday, the ranks of the volunteers looking for Manny swelled to 250, many from
throughout Middlesex County with others from surrounding counties.
K-9 teams and firefighters using heat-imaging equipment by then had gotten involved.
Eck said some of the police in the borough asked their kids, around Manny's age,
where they would go.
The investigative team, led by Lt. Michael Burns and Sgt. Richard Sloan, found out
Manny liked going to Toys R Us in East Brunswick. Volunteers handed out fliers there.
Police had searched Manny's Thompson Place home several times for clues and
interviewed friends, teachers and pupils, several of them more than once.
During Tuesday's press conference, the family pleaded to their son to return to them.
"If you're out there, we're not mad at you," Manny's father said. "We want you to
come home."
On Tuesday night, the state police brought in a helicopter with heat-seeking gear to
search for Manny in the open area between his neighborhood and Bordentown Avenue, Eck
said.
The FBI arrived to handle case management — documenting leads and helping with the
paper trail.
Rescuers at some point passed the house at 33 Scarlet Drive where Manny was found,
but no one looked under the porch, the underside of which was tightly enclosed with
lattice.
Then on Wednesday, ordinary citizens arrived in droves.
"Every walk of life," Eck said. "A lot of community people."
Those 100 private citizens, who joined 150 other volunteers who resumed the search at
noon, included a police officer from Brooklyn, N.Y., with no ties to the family or
the area, Eck said.
"I want to offer my services and the services of my colleagues. A lot of people want
to help," Eck recalled him saying.
Around 11 a.m. Wednesday, Eric Martin, chief of Central Jersey Technical Rescue based
in Fanwood, was called. He had already been preparing to join the search, he said. He
called other rescue organizations, from Bergen County, Atlantic City, New York City
and elsewhere.
Martin and other search experts came equipped with statistical data and knowledge of
the ways of lost people and hiding children.
"Usually a kid wants to nest," Martin said. "Every noise they hear is like lions and
tigers and bears."
As darkness closed in, the tension mounted. Would the boy be able to survive another
night out of doors?
For Eck, thoughts of Timothy Wiltsey, the 5-year-old boy who was reported missing in
May 1991 from a carnival in the borough and whose skeletal remains were found 11
months later, drifted in and out of his mind. So did thoughts of his 11-year-old
daughter.
"You think, what if this was my kid? Would you stop searching?" Eck said. "We weren't
going to stop until we found him."
The 49-hour ordeal ended Wednesday night. A collection of six dog-rescue groups had
been looking for the boy for about a half-hour when Lara, an 8-year-old German
shepherd, hit upon the latticed deck of a Scarlet Drive home near the Vargas house.
The dog started pacing and scratched at the area, said its handler, Valerie Mokides
of the volunteer New Jersey Search and Rescue K-9 group in Bergen. After shining her
flashlight under the deck, she spotted Manny.
Sayreville firefighter and off-duty Home News Tribune staff photographer Jody Somers,
who was guiding Mokides and Lara through the area, was called over and ripped off the
lattice work. Manny was found unconscious and breathing, clad in sweat pants and a
T-shirt.
Dogs had previously been sent in to track from Manny's house but had not gotten over
to the yard where the boy was found, authorities said. Officials said they were
surprised someone was able to get inside the lattice work without disturbing it
because it was so tight around the deck.
When Manny finally turned up Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Eck was in the middle of giving
a press briefing at the Sayreville Emergency Squad building on Washington Road.
"The drive over there (to where the boy was found) was the drive from hell," Eck
said. "I don't think I took a breath. I didn't know if he was dead or alive."
Eck and other veteran police officers, firefighters, rescuers, shed tears when the
boy was found to be in good condition, Eck said.
"We were sitting on the edge of a blade for more than 48 hours," he said.
Authorities last night were still trying to piece together Manny's path of flight and
whether he remained under the porch for the entire time he was missing.
Family members told investigators that Manny was under the porch all those hours,
police said. But they had yet to interview the boy as of last night.
Hospital spokeswoman Donna Sellmann said the family did not wish to speak with or be
photographed by the media.
But news organizations still camped out at the entrance to the hospital, hoping for
an interview with Manny and his family.
On Wednesday night, Dawn and Manuel Vargas expressed both elation, exhaustion and
gratitude to everyone involved in the search effort.
"We're just happy it all worked out," Manuel Vargas said.
"I'm still in shock," his wife said.
School officials yesterday said they were unable to comment on when the boy would
return to Sayreville Upper Elementary School.
"He's a very lucky boy," Principal Ed Aguiles said. "There was a lot of praying and
hand-holding."
During the massive effort to find the youth, counseling was available to pupils,
Aguiles said. An assembly was held Tuesday morning for the entire school, while
workers in the guidance department visited classrooms and offered one-on-one
counseling.
"Every guidance counselor in the district was at my disposal," Aguiles said. "Every
school psychologist in the district was at my disposal."
PTO members and local teachers had pitched in during the search, school officials
said. Superintendent of Schools Frank Alfano said the outpouring of support from
district members says a lot about Sayreville.
"People work together," Alfano said. "It's close-knit even though it's a large
community."
"Missing Child" posters with Manny's picture on them still hung from utility poles
around the Vargas's neighborhood yesterday afternoon. But more encouraging news hung
from a sign at the corner at the family's block: two balloons with smiles on the
front, and one that said "welcome home."
Members of Manny's extended family were in the Vargas's home yesterday, waiting for
the boy and his parents to return. Nick Simone, Dawn Vargas's brother, said he had
seen Manny in the hospital the night before. He'd been eating Taco Bell and seemed in
good spirits, he said.
It was a relief — and a welcome contrast to what Simone called the hardest two days
of his life, while his nephew was missing.
"Everything stops," he said.