Police said there’s no obvious sign of foul play on a missing boy found dead in the Grand Canyon wilderness yesterday.
Last week, 5-year-old Jerold Joseph Williams had been camping in the Kaibab National Forest with a group of about 20 people, including relatives, when he allegedly wandered away from his mother in pursuit of insects.
He never returned, but wasn’t officially reported lost by his co-campers until several hours later.
Almost 500 volunteers, sometimes walking shoulder to shoulder, desperately scoured Arizona’s rugged and densely-wooded terrain that had seemingly swallowed up the inquisitive towheaded youngster without a sound last Thursday.
Above them, military choppers equipped with night-vision aided the would-be rescuers; and, on the ground, highly-skilled sniffer dogs accompanied searchers riding ATVs.
But the race to find Jerold Williams alive and well tragically ended on Monday, when the youngster’s corpse was discovered in the woods -- oddly enough, not more than 200 yards from his campsite.
"We don't have positive identification yet, but we do believe that this is the body of the missing child," confirmed a spokesman for the Coconino County Sheriff's Office.
Dental records will be used now to formally ID the deceased boy’s remains, and an autopsy to pinpoint his cause and manner of death is pending.
