Searchers agonizing they didn’t get to boy in time
Crews had looked in same spot where James was found
By TERA CAMUS Cape Breton Bureau and VINCENZO RAVINA
Wed. Dec 9, 2009
Cape Breton Search and Rescue workers never stopped looking for James Delorey on the weekend, even as other volunteers went home to their warm beds.
Yet the group’s leader, Paul Vienneau, said searchers are agonizing over the fear that they didn’t do enough, soon enough, to find the boy.
“The only way to explain it is we’re on a roller-coaster ride at the moment,” Mr. Vienneau said Tuesday. “From the highest of highs, to being so ecstatic yesterday, to the lowest of the low when we got the news this morning (that James had died), and all of us feel the same way. We’re all very emotional about this.”
He said searchers had been at the exact spot where the seven-year-old was eventually found, about 1.5 kilometres behind his South Bar home near Kilkenny Lake, about 13 hours earlier. He said he is sure the boy wasn’t in the thick brush there at that time.
Mr. Vienneau said the hero of the story is the family dog Chance, who stayed with the autistic boy from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning before returning home.
“The little fella didn’t like that dog,” Mr. Vienneau said. “The dog loved the little fella, and they were only together six months, but dogs know if there’s a handicap there and he took care of him. The dog followed that boy, the boy wouldn’t follow that dog. The dog wouldn’t leave him alone.”
Before searchers could retrace the dog’s fresh tracks to try to find James, a Halifax Regional Search and Rescue team that had arrived Monday morning to relieve Cape Breton crews stumbled upon him under brush and snow by Kilkenny Lake. He was unconscious but still alive.
Blair Doyle, leader of the Halifax team, said the stormy weather hindered searchers.
“We were 100 metres away with our whistles, actually approaching the find site, and the sound wouldn’t go through the woods,” he said.
Mr. Doyle said the boy was found lightly covered in snow and in the fetal position. There was a depression in the snow next to him where the dog had been. Mr. Doyle said the dog was too small to have provided much warmth.
The woods were so thick that the teams had to cut a hole through the trees to extract James. Mr. Doyle said that’s part of the reason why it took two hours to get the boy out of the woods.
“We always hope for faster. Nothing’s ever soon enough,” he said. “We work hard and we have to know that we did the best job we could, and the results are the results.”
Still, his Cape Breton counterpart, Mr. Vienneau, said he can’t help but go over details of the search in his head.
“We did our job but I just wish we’d done it a lot sooner,” Mr. Vienneau said, his voice breaking. “You wouldn’t believe what’s going through our minds right now, but everything was done the way it was supposed to be done.
“Unfortunately it turned out this way.”
