McEntee: Finding Trejon a final act of love
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 08/04/2009
What are the odds?
When Trejon Fite slipped off a pipe and into a canal on June 13, police, sheriff and fire departments mounted an intense search with boats, helicopters and cadaver dogs. Still, the canal runs deep and cold and ultimately feeds into the Great Salt Lake, and the boy simply could not be found.
But his grandfather, Rickey Brown, never gave up, searching the canal every day for the 7-year-old.
It's what those who love the missing almost always do. They marshal their strength and hope, their friends and relatives, and they never stop searching.
And once in a while, they find what they're seeking.
On Saturday, a team of Brown's duck-hunter friends spotted a light blue shirt in a marsh on the lake. By day's end, the state medical examiner confirmed that the remains were Trejon's.
Considering the size of the lake and its southern shore, it's hard to imagine how those men managed to find that little boy in the vastness.
Well, for one thing, these men -- Mike Butkovich, Brian Anderson, Ron Hall, Aaron Shepherd and Gary Vanecklenberg -- have hunted along that shore for years. They know the lake and its marshes. They had that knowledge, and the boat and gear and the need, to go out and find Trejon.
By all accounts, it was beyond arduous. Butkovich told of searching the lake's banks, then taking out a boat until they got stuck, then striking out on foot.
Wearing chest waders that must
have been stifling in 80-degree weather, the men used sticks to pick their way through water, mud and treacherous sinkholes. They used GPS units to navigate through tamarisk trees so thick, Butkevich said, it was like a jungle.
It took them two hours to make two miles. Then they spotted the shirt, and a search and rescue team retrieved the child's remains.
This is what happens when the people who love a child, and the friends and family who love them, refuse to give up.
It's happened before: In the mid-1990s, a teenager was killed in an old mine in Tooele. Official searchers had to retreat when the mine became dangerously unstable. The boy's uncle ultimately rounded up some relatives, went into the mine and brought his nephew home.
A Boy Scout gets lost in the high Uintas, the authorities finally pull out, and their families never stop looking. Sometimes the missing are never found, but the search never really ends.
It's that inadvertent glance over the shoulder, a sense of nearness, of impossible contact. But it gives us hope, and somehow soothes the yearning that never subsides.
It's the need that kept Trejon's grandfather on that canal every day, and it's what sent those hunters out in the heat and the muck to spot that little patch of blue.
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Fri Oct 23, 2009 8:36 am
