Evergreen toddler still missing
Searching for a missing 3-year-old boy, Jesse Hopkins with the Flathead County Search and Rescue team walks Thursday morning with Panzer, a search dog, along Spring Creek. The creek is just east of Maple Drive in Evergreen, where the toddler was last seen on Wednesday night. An Amber Alert was declared Thursday morning after all-night search efforts were unsuccessful. Craig Moore photo/Daily Inter Lake
An Amber Alert was issued Thursday morning for a boy who disappeared from a relative's house in Evergreen Wednesday night.
By JIM MANN
The Daily Inter Lake
An Amber Alert was issued Thursday morning for a boy who disappeared from a relative's house in Evergreen on Wednesday night.
The alert signals that 3-year-old Loic J.M. Rogers is believed to have been abducted.
The alert was issued on the heels of a massive search that attracted more than 200 people from across the Flathead Valley. But as of 11:15 a.m. Thursday, the search was unsuccessful, prompting the alert.
"It was just the timeline," said Sherry Reid, a spokeswoman for the Flathead County Sheriff's Office. "He's been gone for such a long time."
The grid search in the area of Maple Drive will continue, Reid added.
Rogers was last seen by his father at about 7 p.m. Wednesday.
Undersheriff Pete Wingert said the father, Loic and a younger sibling had just eaten dinner at a relative's house on Maple Drive. The father took Loic out to the car and went back inside the house to get the other child.
When he came back out, the boy was gone, Wingert said.
The boy was wearing a red, white and blue coat; blue jeans; a multi-colored beanie hat; a long-sleeved T-shirt and tan leather boots. He is 3 feet tall and has blonde hair and blue eyes.
Anyone with information is urged to call the Sheriff's Office at 758-5610.
The boy was reported missing at 7:10 p.m. Wednesday and the search was launched immediately, attracting some 200 people for an overnight effort, Wingert said.
There were at least 200 people searching up to a mile from the house again on Thursday morning.
"There has been an overwhelming response from the community," Wingert said.
Dozens of cars lined Maple Drive, where a sheriff's command center van was the hub for dispersing searchers. Throughout the neighborhood, searchers could be seen walking between houses and through frost-covered brush fields.
Jenny Johnson and Kristy Pancoast drove about 15 miles from Bigfork to help with the search.
"We came up from Bigfork," Johnson said. "We heard it on the news last night. We had kids too, so we would want somebody to help us."
Evergreen resident Chuck Storkson and his wife, Cindy, came out early for the search.
"I know if it was my little girl out there, I would want all the help I could get," Chuck Storkson said. "I've been out here for about an hour. I've been looking in every shed and every car that I've come across."
But for Storkson and some of the other searchers, it didn't seem right that such a young boy could be missing for so long without being seen.
"You would think he would knock on somebody's door."