K9 finds 3 lost boys in woods: ‘The whole neighborhood was looking for us’

By Howard Monroe

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    MAGNOLIA, New Jersey (KYW) — Two New Jersey families have a lot to be thankful for. Their grandsons went missing for a full afternoon Monday and were found miles away from home.

Three young boys under the age of 10 went on a bike ride and never returned home Monday.

Their bikes were found near a creek on Otter Branch Road. They were eventually found a mile away.

This story does have a happy ending, but they’re in hot water with their families right now.

“The whole neighborhood was looking for us,” Leo Evans said. “I mean the whole neighborhood.”

This may look like a regular youth summer art camp, but for brothers Kai and Leo Evans, this is pretty much all they can do for fun. With another friend, they got lost on Monday while riding their bikes through the woods in Magnolia.

It took departments from Camden and Gloucester Counties to find them.

“Thank you if you guys are watching this,” Kai said. “I’m grateful that you guys found us.”

“It’s actually mostly Shiloh that found us,” Leo said.

Shiloh is a bloodhound with the Gloucester County Sheriff’s Department.

When the boys couldn’t be found for hours, she was called in to help.

“They’re trained on human scent,” Sheriff Officer Alex Molnar said. “We give them a specific scent and they’re trained to track that specific human scent.”

The Sheriff’s Office first got bloodhounds in 2013. They’re trained in looking for kids and older adults with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.

To find Kai, Leo and their friend, they collected their bed sheets, but a major roadblock is a creek they were walking through to find the boys.

“Sometimes water was couple inches,” Molnar said, “other times, it was over our thighs, up to the waist.”

After a mile of walking through the creek, the boys were found.

“Come around the corner through the creek and there are these three kids, standing in the creek like ‘Lord of the Flies,’ just hanging out,” Molnar said.

Their grandmother says they will spend a lot more time at home.

“I didn’t tell them they were grounded until they got home. Actually in the car,” Cherese Evans said. “In the car, I was like just so you know you’re confined to the backyard and the house for the rest of the summer.”

None of the boys were seriously hurt, but police say they were looking up videos on YouTube on how to survive in the wild.

One thing they had to remind the boys of is that you can’t make a fire with wet wood.

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