Volunteers comb fields, bodies of water for lost boy
As it stretched into its fourth day and widened its scope across frozen Manitoba farmland, the search for two-year-old Chase Martens on Friday started to look ever more like a recovery mission.
Hundreds of volunteers continued to poke through fields around the boy’s family’s farm, 110 kilometres west of Winnipeg, as drones scanned overhead and dogs sniffed the undergrowth. But a police supervisor struck a realistic tone, noting that the boy has not been seen since sundown Tuesday. Nothing has been found, police said, neither clothing nor footprints nor any other sign of what happened to the blue-eyed, brown-haired toddler.
“Our radius is expanding, and now involving more and more water. Most of the ground has been searched,” said RCMP spokesman Sgt. Bert Paquet.
“You have to keep in mind the time frame we are dealing with at this point.
“Obviously, we remain hopeful. It’s in our nature. … We are aware of what we’re dealing with right now.”
Friday marked an expansion in the work of an RCMP underwater recovery team, including divers, as the search area was widened to include more ponds, creeks, sloughs and other bodies of water, many of them beginning to thaw. In all, the search area now has a radius of more than three kilometres, double what it was on the first day. Technicians could be seen kicking through the ice around drainage ditches, and dislodging large chunks of ice to search a murky creek.
The boy’s disappearance remains a devastating mystery. It seemed to his parents as if he was there one minute and gone the next, police said, simply vanishing from the yard of his home while his parents and two sisters, aged six and seven, were inside.
Police have said foul play, while not ruled out, is not suspected.