3-Year-Old Casey Hathaway Goes Missing in North Carolina, Volunteers Mobilize

Casey Hathaway, 3, went missing from his grandmother's home in Ernul, North Carolina on Jan. 22, 2019. (Craven County Sheriff's Office)

Dozens of volunteers have mobilized in North Carolina after a 3-year-old boy went missing on Jan. 22.

A missing poster states that Casey Hathaway, a white male standing 2 feet 4 inches tall and weighing 25 pounds, with brown eyes and blonde hair, is missing.

“Residents living in the area are asked to check storage sheds, vehicles, and their property for the child ... We’re in an emergency search. If you have any information that will help find the missing child, please contact our office immediately. Thank you,” the Craven County Sheriff’s Office said.

The boy was playing with two other children in the backyard of his grandmother’s home in Ernul on Tuesday afternoon when he vanished. Adults realized he had gone missing when the two other kids went inside the house without Casey.

The grandmother and other adults searched for the boy for 45 minutes but, after failing to locate him, called 911, reported WCTI.

After an hourslong-search turned up no sign of the boy, a fresh search started on Wednesday morning, with dozens of volunteers and multiple law enforcement agencies participating. Video footage showed volunteers lining up at a table outside a parking area near the house and signing in with law enforcement.

There was such a huge response from volunteers that people started getting turned away.

As of 9 a.m., there were no new leads.

Craven County Sheriff Chip Hughes told WSOC that the boy wasn’t adequately dressed for the temperatures, which dipped below freezing at night, and there was extra urgency because of the numerous sinkholes and deep water ditches in the area.

“We are doing everything we can to find this child, utilizing all resources at our disposal and once again, we want these folks in the Cayton community and Ernul community to certainly keep an ear out,” said Hughes. “We’ve got well over 100 volunteers that have come here.”

Speaking to WNCT, the sheriff added: “It’s a stressful time for the family and everybody involved. But I can tell you we are certainly doing our due diligence, spending a lot of time with them and just sorting through all the different stories. And as calls come in, and we’ve had a number of them about things they’ve heard in the woods, none of them have panned out yet. But every lead we are following and going straight to it.”

He vowed to continue the search as long as needed.

“We are not leaving here until we bring some closure to this family,” said Hughes. “And, hopefully, it will be a positive, end on a positive note.”

Anyone with information can call the sheriff’s office at 252-633-0498 or the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation at 919-662-4500.

Missing Children

There were 464,324 missing children reported in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center in 2017, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Under federal law, when a child is reported missing to law enforcement they must be entered into the database. In 2016, there were 465,676 entries.

“This number represents reports of missing children. That means if a child runs away multiple times in a year, each instance would be entered into NCIC separately and counted in the yearly total. Likewise, if an entry is withdrawn and amended or updated, that would also be reflected in the total,” the center noted.

In 2017, the center said it assisted officers and families with the cases of more than 27,000 missing children. In those cases, 91 percent were endangered runaways, and 5 percent were family abductions.

About one in seven children reported missing to the center in 2017 were likely victims of child sex trafficking.

Missing children typically fall into five categories: kidnapped by a family member, abducted by a nonfamily perpetrator, runaways, those who got lost, stranded, or injured, or those who went missing due to benign reasons, such as misunderstandings, according to a report by the Department of Justice (pdf) in 2017. Reported missing children dropped from 6.5 per 1,000 children in 1999 to 3.1 per 1,000 in 2013.

From NTD News