To lose a child to death is always one of the worst nightmares a parent can face. To lose a child and not know whether they are alive or dead is another form of horrible. The unknown.
I have a little experience with the unknown....due to a very sick individual, I have been on an airplane, rushing to my childs (21 at the time) side, not knowing if he would be alive when I got there...it is a feeling that cannot be explained and the memory alone is enough to bring tears to my eyes.
The unknown is sometimes the scariest of all feelings for a parent, which makes this story today about two children, found and reunited with their parents, all the more poignant and special.
I am not taking one thing away from the parents of our military men and women and the hell they go through while their kids are away in Iraq, or Afghanistan or any other country our military is based in, but this post is about two boys, kidnapped and taken from their families....both found alive and well.
It isn't often we get happily ever afters and I would like to take the time to notice when we do have one.
The search continued Wednesday for a Franklin County teenager last seen around 3:30 p.m. Monday near the intersection of Buth Lane and Highway 50 in Beaufort, Mo.
The Franklin County Sheriff's Department, Missouri State Highway Patrol and the FBI are searching for William "Ben" Ownby, 13, who went missing shortly after he got off a school bus near his home. Volunteers from the community, neighboring police and fire departments and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also joined in the search.
Authorities said they consider Ben to be endangered and on Tuesday morning issued a nationwide Amber Alert.
Thanks to one young, observant student that reported seeing a vehicle, the police had a starting point which led to, not only finding Ben, but to finding another child that has been missing for four years.
For better than four years, Shawn Hornbeck's parents dealt with their grief over the 11-year-old's disappearance by devoting themselves to bringing missing people home.
On Saturday, they showed off their best argument for hanging onto hope — the boy, now a shaggy-haired 15-year-old, joined them at a news conference a day after police found him and another recently abducted boy at a suburban St. Louis apartment, both alive and apparently well.
"Shawn is a miracle here," his mother, Pam Akers, said Saturday at an elementary school in his hometown of Richwoods. "We're glad to have him home. I still feel like I'm in a dream, only this time it's a good dream, not the nightmare I've had four-and-a-half years."
Hornbeck's stepfather, Craig Akers, said he and his wife were in disbelief when they were reunited with the boy.
"There was that split second of shock," he said. "Once I saw the face, I said, 'Oh my God, that's my son."'
Read the stories...
It is so good to see a happy ending, so good to see a kidnapped child, in this case two kidnapped children reunited with their parents.
A routine search warrant led police to investigate the Kirkwood, Mo., apartment dweller, Michael Devlin, 41, an Imo's Pizza manager and part-time funeral home worker. He was charged with first-degree kidnapping and bail was set at $1 million.
Let us just hope this man get a judge that is not forgiving, is not a bleeding heart and gives this man the sentence he deserves for the misery he has caused these two families.
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