After 48 hours of intensive searching, there is still no trace of the missing Emile, a 2.5-year-old toddler who disappeared Saturday evening in the village of Vernet in the Alpes-Haute-Provence department in the south of France. “Despite all the searches, we have not yet been able to locate the child,” prefect Marc Chappuis said on Monday evening.
The search will continue on Tuesday, but will be more targeted and selective. Initially, a search was carried out in a perimeter of 5 kilometers around the hamlet where the toddler disappeared. All houses were searched, but no trace was found there. The neighborhood was searched with, among other things, two helicopters, ten teams with rescue dogs, 500 volunteers and drones with thermal cameras, but so far without results.
“If the child is not found within 48 hours in the perimeter we searched, we believe it means that it is not there. So he must be somewhere else,” Chappuis said at the press conference. Everything will therefore be more targeted and selective on Tuesday, although he did not make it clear how exactly that will work.
Not intervened
The toddler disappeared Saturday afternoon, shortly after being dropped off at his grandparents’ house. He was there playing in the yard while his grandparents loaded the car just before 5pm. When they wanted to put him in the car fifteen minutes later, he turned out to be gone.
Two people have seen the boy walking, they suspect, in a nearby street. They did not intervene, and that is not surprising, according to attorney Remy Avon. According to him, the neighborhood has an “atmosphere like a village square” and it is not uncommon for children to play and walk around in the street. Therefore, the two witnesses did not suspect that anything was wrong when they saw the child walking.
No suspicion
Still, according to the prosecutor, there is no suspicion of what happened to the boy. “All options are still on the table,” he emphasized at the press conference on Monday evening. He did not want to say whether the witnesses saw something about the child, panic or cheerfulness, for example. “No hypothesis is discarded, but none is favored. We are still taking everything into account.”
The mayor of Vernet, François Balique, said he still hopes that Emile will be found safely. “I still have hope that we will find him tomorrow, yes,” he said. “We’re going to find him.” He shares the “dismay” of his fellow villagers, he said, that despite all those searches, Emile has not yet been found. “I’m very disappointed, I don’t understand why we haven’t found little Emile yet,” he said.