THE FRED COLUMN -- fred martin

The night on that mountaintop was as dark as a night can be.

Even the millions of splotchy stars that seemed to hang only a few

hundred yards above our heads shed no light on the wilderness that

surrounded us.

Somewhere out in the invisible forest was a 3-year-old boy. Jaryd Atadero

had gone missing at about 11 a.m. on a Saturday two weeks ago. The church

singles group from Denver that had taken him and his little sister on a

hike that morning hadn’t called for help until 2 p.m.

That made it almost 5 p.m. by the time a search and rescue team could

form, get up the mountain, set up a command post and begin hunting for

the boy.

By the time my partner, Nedra Kechter, and I arrived on the scene about 8

p.m. -- it’s about a 70-minute drive up a steep, winding road from town

-- 26 search and rescue team members and four tracker dogs were out in

the darkness looking for Jaryd.

Half a dozen others manned the search headquarters trailer, while

deputies who had already questioned the members of the church group

briefed investigators from the sheriff’s office.

As advocates from the Victim Response Team of the Larimer County

Sheriff’s Office, Nedra and I were there to provide support for friends

and relatives of the boy. Our most immediate concern was dealing with the

woman who had volunteered to watch Jaryd on the hike.

She was totally distraught and inconsolable. I do not deal well with

women in this condition; most men don’t. So Nedra kindly offered to take

care of this woman, and I would take the boy’s father.

I went inside the command post -- one of those flat little camping

trailers that expands and pops up into a rather sizable hut. At one end

was a double bunk; at the other a table covered with maps. One man

monitored radio calls from searchers as they checked in with their

locations and described what their headlamps were allowing them to see

out there in the darkness.

Another man plotted searchers’ locations on a map; yet another wrote down

in detail the information they were passing back. It was all very calm,

very organized, very professional.

One of the deputies at the command post, Earl Fawcett, hailed me when I

came in.

“How’d you find this place?” Earl grinned. “I thought you were a city

boy.”

I asked about Jaryd’s father, Allyn -- his mother, it turned out, was

living in San Diego -- and learned he had gone back to a rustic tourist

lodge he owns about 15 miles down the mountain.

Before heading there, I checked with Nedra about the woman. No change;

she was still deeply troubled, still blaming herself for losing Jaryd,

still afraid to face the other members of the group.

We offered to put her up for the night at a hotel in town, but all she

wanted to do was sit in the truck until searchers found Jaryd.

As it turned out, that would be a long wait.

It took almost half an hour to navigate the 15 twisty miles down to Allyn

Atadero’s lodge. I used the time to figure out what in the world I was

going to say to him. We are trained to be straight with victims and not

give them false hope. Yet we also sift through the facts of a case to try

and find whatever positive information there is.

After introducing myself, I briefed the lost boy’s father on how

meticulously the search was being managed from the command post and about

the 26 search and rescue members and four dogs in the field. I told him

that some 30 more fresh trackers and dogs would be on scene at daybreak,

followed by an Air Force helicopter equipped with heat-seeking devices.

“What do you think has happened to my boy?” Allyn asked.

I told him I really wasn’t qualified to have an opinion about that; I was

merely a shoulder to lean on, or cry on if he wished. But he insisted.

“OK,” I said. “I think a kid that age would eventually find a hole in the

ground, or in a tree or between a couple of rocks. He’d crawl in there,

put his thumb in his mouth and curl up tight as he could and sleep.” I

did not mention that I was having a difficult time not imagining our

grandson Brett, almost exactly the same age as Jaryd, out in the

wilderness on that cold, dark night.

Allyn, a P.E. teacher and coach at a middle school in Littleton, Colo.,

agreed with my guess.

“Yeah, that makes sense,” he said. “That’s why they haven’t found him yet

-- it’s dark and he’s curled up in a hole and that’s keeping him warm.

Then, tomorrow morning ... “ His voice faded and his eyes brimmed with

tears.

There were tears on that mountain all week long and well into the

following week. But Jaryd Atadero’s tomorrow still hasn’t come.

* FRED MARTIN is a former Newport Beach resident who now writes from his

home in Fort Collins, Colo. His column appears on Wednesdays.

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