The Daily Progress

August 10, 1999

By PATRICK HICKERSON

Daily Progress staff writer

Immeasurable joy dashed the darkest fear for two Albemarle County parents

Monday afternoon, when their 2-year-old son was reunited with them 26

hours after wandering from a relatives trailer setting off a massive

search in the Blenheim community.

As hundreds watched and wept under a summer sun, the parents of Jonathan

Makepeace Artie Makepeace of Ruckersville and Deborah L. Glann of

Charlottesville embraced their scraped-up, tick-bitten son in a waiting

ambulance.

Makepeace emerged from the ambulance before a dozen cameras to publicly

thank hundreds of rescuers and make a few further remarks before the trio

headed to the University of Virginia Medical Center.

Im just so happy, Makepeace said. Its just a miracle.

Relatives of Jonathan had called police shortly before noon Sunday and

reported the boy missing from a relatives residence along Paynes Lane in

Blenheim in southern Albemarle near Carters Mountain.

By Monday afternoon, about 300 people 200 volunteers and 100

professionals joined the search. They converged on a patch of the Quandary

Farm to start looking for the barefoot boy clad in a black T-shirt and a

diaper.

The primary search area was three-quarters of a mile in radius from the

trailer.

Among several agencies, the search attracted members of the Virginia State

Police, Civil Air Patrol, Virginia Department of Emergency Services and

Virginia Department of Forestry. News media from as far away as Richmond

and Washington arrived with satellite trucks.

A few minutes before 1:30 p.m., Jonathan was found doing what many

children his age do about that time napping.

While he slept in a pine grove about 50 yards away, a German shepherd

named Kachi adjusted its ears and started acting as though Jonathan was

nearby.

The dog, part of the Dogs East volunteer search and rescue organization,

found the right scent and scampered to the slumbering boy and woke him up

a third of a mile from the trailer.

Kachis handler followed the dog and found the boy.

My name is Jonathan, the child said.

About that time, Dale Newton had returned to the search scene after

helping out Sunday. The 31-year-old mason at the University of Virginia

couldnt work while there was a boy missing in land he had known for the

past 25 years.

With the help of a hovering Virginia State Police helicopter, Newton,

following on the ground in a pickup, helped Jonathan and his rescuers find

their way out of the grove.

Her radio was going dead, Newton said.

Robert Koester of the Appalachian Search and Rescue and the incident

commander, identified the dogs handler only as Heidi.

She feels its grabbing glory, Koester said.

Teams had passed through the area earlier during night searches, Koester

said.

But he said the odds of finding a small child in the dark is one in four.

Newton found Jonathan to be a composed young man.

He was quiet, Newton said. He was just sitting there.

Jonathan was listed in good condition at the University of Virginia

Medical Center on Monday night.

Koester and others who participated in the search were taken aback by the

amount of community support for the operation.

That hundreds of volunteers took part on a work day is pretty amazing in

and of itself,Koester said.

Billy Craig, a 16-year-old William Monroe High School student, spent

Sunday and Monday on his hands and knees, some of it edging through briar

patches, searching for the boy he had met twice before.

Jonathan struck him as fearless. He would walk up to anybody, Craig said.