Billy Davis

Everybody was looking for Colby Ridgeway.

In thick brush around the Ridgeway home north of Courtland, Terry Bryant and his search dog, Raine, used a jacket from the 2-year-old to begin the missing-child search Tuesday afternoon.

Bryant, who is deputy director of Panola EMA, and the black Labrador started at a swing set in front of the house, then moved north of the home, but all they discovered was that briars like bare skin and canines.

“It was a wall of green vines with long thorns. They tore us up,” Bryant said hours after two searchers, a father and son, located the child north of his family’s home.  

Across Morrow Road, just south of the home, Batesville police officers tied a flashlight to a limb and lowered it into an old cistern, praying they didn’t find something at the bottom. The ad hoc flashlight search found nothing but water, but the cistern was searched later with a camera to double check.

In the same woods south of Morrow Road, sheriff’s deputy Mike Davis and other searchers formed a line near where Morrow intersects with Travis Road. They then walked east through briar patches and pine stands until they could see Wells Street Extended north of Courtland.

When more searchers arrived, Davis said they hit the woods again at Travis Road, this time spreading out to cover more territory. This time they walked all the way to Wells Street Extended, where Davis radioed for a truck to pick up the weary searchers.

Northeast of the Ridgeway home, a group of searchers that included Sheriff Dennis Darby, volunteer firefighters and civilians walked through fields, and up and down ravines, looking for the youngster. A trio of volunteer firefighters walked in and around ravines until they popped out of woods behind a home along Hawkins Road, then hitched a ride back to Morrow Road.

By then daylight from an already-overcast afternoon was slowly bleeding away.

In the fields and the woods, the temperature was chilly but not cold, but of course nobody knows if Mississippi’s winter nighttime temperatures will dip or plummet when the sun goes down.  

The phone call reporting a missing child was made to the Panola County Sheriff’s Department at 2:15 Tuesday afternoon according to a dispatcher’s review of the phone log.  

By 2:30, a small army of law enforcement, most of them sheriff’s deputies, were piling into the driveway of the Ridgeway home, at 1749 Morrow Road.

Over their radios, the growing army learned a two-year-old boy had wandered away after playing in his front yard. With the boy was a white pit bull that answered to “Sugar.”

Now, almost two hours had passed since the first radio calls and there had been no sightings of a child. boy. No faint barks from Sugar.

Among the crowd of searchers, word was spreading among some that it seemed impossible for a two-year-old to wander farther than the ravines, fields and woods that had been searched and searched again.

By four o’clock more than 200 people were lining the Ridgeway family’s driveway or scattered all along the road. There were unseen search teams in the woods at the time but at the Ridgeway home people seemed to be waiting for orders — any orders — because there was an undeniable feeling of urgency. But the only order people heard was to leave the family’s front yard and head back to the road.

A half-mile north of the massive search, Shelton Hawkins and son Tyler, 15, parked in an overgrown driveway on the east side of Travis Road. It was 4:26.

The dad knew there was a search under way just down the road, though he never drove through the fleet of automobiles and sea of people camped out at 1749 Morrow Road.

“I didn’t go down there because I didn’t want anybody with a badge to tell us we were getting in the way,” Hawkins recalled.

“I just told Tyler let’s go looking where nobody’s looked yet,” he said.  

Hawkins said he was familiar with the pine thickets and ponds along Travis Road, where he has hunted deer and coons.  

Beginning behind an old shack, the father and son walked east past a couple of ponds until they turned northeast and followed a ditch. Somewhere among sage grass fields and pines they came across other searchers then continued to follow the ditch. On the north end of a large pond, Tyler told his father he heard a dog bark.

“I told him I didn’t hear anything,” Shelton recalled.

Then the dog barked again. Then they heard the cry of a child, too.

Following the child’s cry, the father and son found Colby Ridgeway on the bank of a massive 20-foot creek, with Sugar barking at them from the other side. It was 4:59.

“Part of the bank had fallen in and he was holding on to a root, like he was trying to climb up the other side but couldn’t,” Shelton Hawkins recalled.

The father said Tyler scooped the child in his arms and carried him to a nearby cornfield, where more searchers were waiting with a Ranger utility task vehicle to carry Colby out of the woods.

Back at the Ridgeway home, news was spreading among the massive crowd that the child had been found.

“They got him, they got him,” someone said, and others nearby burst into cheers.

But was it true?

The people with badges were sprinkled throughout the crowd, and they were listening to the news but asking for more information.

A full minute ticked by before word came: the Ridgeway boy was found on Travis Road. And he was OK.

On the shoulder of Travis Road, Medstat paramedic Lara Sossaman, smiling sweetly, held the child in her arms and rushed him into a waiting ambulance.

At Tri-Lakes, Colby Ridgeway was treated for a few cuts to his face and legs. But he was otherwise unhurt.

“It felt good to do that,” said Shelton. “It felt like I had made a difference.”