Boy’s Searchers Learn They Had the Wrong Shoe Prints

Rescuers hunting for a 9-year-old in the San Bernardino Mountains were troubled to learn Thursday that searchers had been using photographs of the wrong shoe prints for nearly a week.

As the search for David Gonzales entered its sixth afternoon Thursday, San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies distributed new photos of the soles of the Lake Elsinore boy’s tennis shoes.

Images that trackers had been using for the last week were not accurate, they said, because they depicted the soles of an adult shoe, which bore a different, albeit similar, pattern. The child’s model has less of a zigzag pattern.

Searchers have found numerous prints that resembled the picture but didn’t match.

An hour after the new photographs were distributed to search teams, a U.S. Border Patrol Search and Rescue volunteer discovered a cluster of shoe prints that matched the photographs.

“We’ve got a good print,” searcher Jed Terry called into his walkie-talkie. “We have multiple prints on a trail. I laid the new photograph alongside them. It fits.”

The discovery excited searchers, but it quickly gave way to disappointment.

After following the tiny shoe prints through towering pines, Terry discovered that they began and ended at the Hanna Flat campground where Gonzales vanished Saturday. The prints had indeed been made by Gonzales, but they were made the day before he disappeared, as he and his family hiked through the woods.

“It was determined to be an old sign,” Terry said.

Gonzales, a frail boy with a speech impediment, had been camping with his parents and brother and several other families last weekend when he asked for some cookies locked in the family’s truck.

The boy was given keys to retrieve them, but never returned.

Authorities say they have no evidence of abduction and have chosen to concentrate on searching for David. Survival experts say that given environmental factors and his age, he can survive for perhaps as many as seven days.

Authorities say the mix-up over the shoe prints occurred when they asked the family to identify photographs of the type of shoes the boy was wearing. The family pointed to a photograph, according to San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Cindy Beavers.

Sheriff’s deputies then photographed the soles of the shoes and distributed them to searchers.

But Thursday, a sheriff’s detective pointed out to colleagues that the soles of many types of children’s shoes are different from adult shoes of the same style.

“That’s when we decided to look closer at the shoe tread and noticed some differences,” Beavers said.

Deputies were dispatched to the store where the family had bought the shoes. They bought a pair and flew them by helicopter to the search site.

“The tops of these shoes look almost identical,” Beavers said of the children’s and adult shoes.

“A photograph was shown to the family and we asked them, ‘Are these David’s shoes?’ They said yes. We had to depend on the family to identify photographs of shoes.”