By Krystal Smalley
ksmalley@wbcowqel.com
They were the words everyone was waiting to hear.
“I’ve got a little boy,” Keith Eichhorn radioed in to the base camp.
The little boy Eichhorn found was 18-month-old Joey Somogye who went missing from his home on Olentangy Road early Tuesday afternoon.
Crawford County Sheriff Scott Kent said his office received a call about a missing child at 1:23 p.m. In the call, the boy’s mother, Rebecca Somogye said she had been in the yard with her two children when Joey went into the cornfield. The Sheriff’s Office contacted the Whetstone, Liberty, and Jefferson township fire departments, and the Ohio State Highway Patrol, which provided a helicopter with an infrared camera. The Galion Line Department also provided a truck with a 60-foot boom. Members of the Galion and Bucyrus police departments, Life Support Ambulance, Crawford County Emergency Management, and community members assisted in the search.
Search patterns were set up in the surrounding fields with volunteers walking the ground four rows apart in their attempt to find Joey. Kent and Major Chad Filliater estimated 70 volunteers were combing the fields for the lost toddler.
With the sun beating down and the tops of the corn stalks barely moving in the slight breeze, the search volunteers would trickle in to the home base, an American Red Cross tent set up in the Somogye’s front yard. As the minutes ticked on, more volunteers walked up the long lane to join in the search, applying bug spray and sticking bottles of water in their pockets before heading out to their designated quadrant to search.
The call finally came in at 4:03 p.m. Whetstone Township volunteer firefighter Eichhorn found Joey at the northwest corner of the field north of the Somogye’s property and began the long trek back home. Kurt Somogye, Joey’s father, held his son in his arms as he walked the last bit of the waterway before it met the driveway. Joey, with a tear-tracked dirty face rested on his father’s shoulder, silently watched all the people who made their way to the driveway to see for their own eyes that Joey was home.
PHOTO GALLERY: Missing toddler found