There are so many sad cases regarding missing children that we wanted to share one that was actually joyful. This article chronicles the disappearance and discovery of five-year-old Joshua Lane Bender. Joshua is more than your typical five-year-old, he is from a Mennonite family and community and has Down's Syndrome. The latter made it harder to find him since he is mainly non-verbal but the former made it more possible to find him as the entire Mennonite community of Knob Noster, MO and the surrounding areas turned out to look for him when he came up missing on Saturday, 3 October, around 5 pm. By Sunday morning nearly 200 people were searching for Joshua on his family's property on foot and ATVs. This number also included soldier air crews from nearby Whiteman Air Force base. Also, van loads of Mennonite families from throughout Missouri showed up to assist with the search. Even the Greater Kansas City Down Syndrome Guild came to the search area to provide the family and searchers knowledge of typical places those with Down syndrome might wander to. It would seem almost everyone that heard about Joshua wanted to be a part of his rescue in some fashion.
It must have seemed like the longest night of his mother's life as the temperatures dropped and Joshua was still nowhere to be found. He was described as having on a long-sleeved sweatshirt, but a heavy coat would have been the appropriate attire for a small boy out in the night.
As the morning dawned, the searchers never stopped their steady pace of looking for him and it paid off. Joshua was finally found by someone searching on foot about 100 yards from his family's farmhouse in a huge crop of soybeans on the 240-acre farm. Ironically, the same area had been searched before in the night but Joshua remained invisible to the searchers at the time. His father said when he was found he was cold and wet and had blue feet but there was no lasting damage to Joshua physically.
As for what happened to make Joshua lose his way, his grandfather, Glenn Bender, says Joshua is very interested in what his siblings are doing and he was convinced Joshua followed one of his brothers and got lost along the way. Joshua's grandfather also suspected that he might have gotten scared and fallen asleep, which was why he wasn't found during the night. "What he'll do when he gets scared is he'll sit down on the spot, start crying and stick his thumb in his mouth. After a while, he'll go to sleep."
His grateful parents were talking about putting a tracking device on him to prevent another occurrence like this one. They said that it is worth it to keep him safe at any cost.
His grateful parents were talking about putting a tracking device on him to prevent another occurrence like this one. They said that it is worth it to keep him safe at any cost.
View Joshua's thread on the Find Madeleine forum Here!
Sources:http://www.kctv5.com/news/25260289/detail.html
http://www.nbcactionnews.com/dpp/news/state/missouri/police-searching-for-missing-5-year-old-boy
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