Still no sign of missing tot

Search area expands, but there are few leads in boy's disappearance.

The Daily Inter Lake

Searchers expanded their efforts Friday but there were few leads in the Wednesday-night disappearance of a 3-year-old Kalispell boy who may have been kidnapped outside a home in Evergreen.

Search crews fanned out Friday to explore new areas and re-investigate previously searched areas looking for Loic J.M. Rogers.

Citizen volunteers, Flathead County law-enforcement officers, the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children all were involved in the case.

Law officers suspect that the boy may have been abducted.

"We don't have a lot of leads, but we feel pretty strongly that there probably is foul play involved," Sheriff Mike Meehan told The Associated Press

"That is based solely on the fact that we haven't found the boy and we should have, under the conditions in the area we were searching and the number of searches and the number of people searching."

The boy's parents, Mark and Ariel Rogers, were scheduled for polygraph tests Friday afternoon.

A nationwide Amber Alert was issued Thursday for the missing boy.

When last seen, Loic was wearing a red, white and blue coat, blue jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, tan leather boots and a multicolored beanie hat. Loic is 3 feet tall, weighs 40 pounds and has blond hair and blue eyes.

The Flathead County Sheriff's Office is asking anyone with information on Loic Rogers to call 758-5610.

The county declared an Amber Alert for 3-year-old Loic J.M. Rogers just before noon Thursday, on the heels of a massive overnight search that attracted more than 200 people from across the Flathead Valley.

Meehan said the alert was issued because such an exhaustive search should have turned up a 3-year-old who likely wouldn't have wandered far in cold weather, at night, in an area that he did not know well.

The boy was last seen by his father at about 7 p.m. Wednesday.

Meehan said the father, Loic and a younger sibling had just eaten dinner at a home on Maple Drive off of East Evergreen Drive. The father took Loic outside and told him to get into the car, then went back inside the house to get the younger sibling.

When he came back out, the boy was gone, Meehan said.

The father "said he was inside only for a minute," according to Meehan. "And he said he searched for about 20 minutes before calling law enforcement."

Both the boy's mother and father, who are separated and living a few miles away from Maple Drive, were interviewed around midnight, Meehan said.

The search was launched immediately, attracting some 200 people for an overnight effort, said Flathead County Undersheriff Pete Wingert.

On Thursday morning, there were at least 200 people searching a one-mile area around the house.

"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.

Craig Williams, the Evergreen assistant fire chief, at one point was directing about 40 volunteers who huddled around the command center van in temperatures around 30 degrees.

Williams said the entire department had been on the scene since Wednesday night.

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 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."

Also joining the search was Larry Stevens, whose two boys were the focus of the very first Amber Alert issued in Montana.

Jake and Larrison Stevens were abducted by their mother in August 2003 and taken to Oklahoma. It took a week for their father to figure out their whereabouts, followed by a long, frustrating mission to get them back. The boys finally rejoined their father last November.

Stevens said he didn't hesitate to join the search for Loic Rogers when he heard the boy was missing. In fact, he had two of his employees at HDD horizontal drilling come out to help.

"When you do such an exhaustive search, and you can't find the child, it's looking more and more like foul play," said Meehan, who offered more details on just how extensive the search has been.

Three known sex offenders living in the general area immediately were contacted by detectives and interviewed. Although there were no signs of broken ice, divers checked and "cleared" a pond north of Maple Drive. For the boy to cross Spring Creek to the east, he would have had to cross bridges or he would have been blocked by high fences in many locations, but the area east of the creek was searched extensively anyway.

The creek was searched repeatedly, at one point with the help of a coldwater kayaker. Search dogs with Flathead County Search and Rescue also swept the area.

There was a tip Tuesday night that a salesman had been in the same neighborhood around the time of the abduction. Detectives chased down that lead and found that, indeed, a Kirby vacuum salesman had been in the area.

"We interviewed him and cleared him," Meehan said of the salesman.

Over Wednesday and Thursday, Meehan said, searchers have knocked on every door within two miles of the house on Maple Drive. Homes in the immediate vicinity were contacted Wednesday night.

"A lot of people allowed us to search their houses" in that area, Meehan said.

Fliers with pictures of Loic, who goes by the nickname "Tank," were posted all over the valley. A candlelight vigil was held at the search area Thursday night and a prayer vigil was conducted Friday afternoon.

Flathead County activated its "A Child is Missing" hotline Wednesday night. The system automatically dialed all homes within a 1 1/2-mile radius of the missing child report, providing a recorded message with information on the child.

That alert in itself prompted a good share of the volunteer turnout, Meehan said.