Boy Found After 6-Hour Search : Youngster Visiting Ventura Becomes Lost While Riding His Bike

VENTURA —  Call it the case of the country kid getting lost in the big city.

That’s how Jennifer Robertson of the Central Valley town of Springville described the nearly six-hour search Sunday for her 7-year-old son on the west end of Ventura.

Robertson and her three boys, Aaron, 11; Eric; and 1-year-old Ian, were visiting her sister, Christine Morse, in the 700 block of Poli Street.

They spent Saturday at the California Strawberry Festival in Oxnard, and Morse and the two oldest boys awoke Sunday to go for a bike ride.

Eric was ready at 9:20 a.m., and his mother told him not to leave the driveway.

But when Morse, her mother, Meg Marrell of Porterville, and Aaron were ready to join Eric, the 7-year-old was nowhere to be found.

At 9:50 a.m., they notified authorities that he was missing.

Within about 90 minutes, a helicopter from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department was aiding two dozen Ventura police officers in a block-by-block search.

They searched from Aliso Street west to the Ventura River, from the foothills beyond Grant Park to the beach.

Missing-person fliers went up on power poles and were taped to windows of downtown restaurants. Police officers walked the area, talking to passersby as well as shopkeepers. Also aiding in the search were state park rangers, and security officers from the Buenaventura Mall and Ventura County Fairgrounds.

Morse searched for her nephew door-to-door.

“I went in to Franky’s [restaurant] to give a waitress a flier, and that’s when I started crying,” Morse said.

Eric’s mother waited in her sister’s house, notifying her husband, David, that their boy was missing. She notified members of her church, which started a prayer chain that stretched as far north as Santa Cruz.

As the hours passed with no word of her son’s whereabouts, Robertson said she couldn’t help but think the worst.

“When I heard the helicopter overhead is when I lost it,” she said. “The helicopter is what found the body of a 2-year-old boy who was dumped in a lake in the Central Valley. So when I heard the helicopter, I thought, you know, this is a bad movie.”

Marrell was overwhelmed by the fact that total strangers were helping look for Eric.

“I had many people say they would pray for us,” she said.

They said their prayers were answered at 4 p.m. when Eric was found about two miles southeast of his aunt’s house at the intersection of San Nicholas Street and Arcade Drive.

Chris Trama, 31, and his mother, Joanne, 58, walked outside their Arcade Drive house and saw a young boy who appeared to have fallen off his bike. It was Eric.

“He was laying face down on the sidewalk. He was exhausted, hungry, tired and he looked so bad,” said Joanne Trama, a substitute teaching aide with the Ventura Unified School District.

They took him in and gave him a glass of milk and a banana. Then they tried to help him find his way back to his aunt’s house.

“The boy remembered Poli Street, and after he said he crossed a couple of streets to get here, we knew he lived farther away than just a couple of streets,” Trama said.

Chris Trama loaded Eric and his bike into his truck, and took him from one end of Poli Street to the other. Eric didn’t remember the address, but he remembered a driveway with stairs on it.

About 4:15 p.m., they finally came across one that looked familiar. Eric was back with family.

Jennifer Robertson’s father, Tom Morse of Valencia, praised Trama for bringing his grandson back where he belonged. He pointed out that adults always tell youngsters not to go with strangers, but in this case the stranger turned out to be a lifesaver.

“We were lucky that this stranger was a good guy,” he said.

At the City Hall command post, Ventura Police Lt. Carl Handy said missing children usually turn up within a couple of hours, safe and unharmed.

But Eric’s disappearance concerned authorities because it went beyond what Handy called the comfort zone.

“This one just went way too long,” Handy said.

Eric, his cheeks still flushed from his tiring trek, said he had learned his lesson: “I can’t leave the front of the house.”