Kirkwood, Mo. – Somehow, after all the dashed hopes and dead ends, after the four years of fruitlessly searching forests and mine shafts and Internet bulletin boards, Craig and Pam Akers still expected they would hear news of their kidnapped son.
They just never expected the news would be this good.
The cellphone rang Friday as the couple drove home from work. The county prosecutor was on the line. He advised them to pull over as their hearts began to pound.
“The next words were, ‘We’re 95 percent sure we’ve found Shawn, and he’s alive,”‘ Craig Akers said Saturday. “Those were the sweetest words I ever heard in my life.”
Police found Shawn Hornbeck alive and seemingly well Friday when they searched a suburban St. Louis apartment for a second boy, Ben Ownby, a 13-year-old snatched early last week on his way home from school.
Both boys appeared healthy and at ease during news conferences Saturday, smiling as cameras flashed and video cameras whirred. Their parents did the talking, asking for privacy to let it all sink in.
“Shawn is a miracle here,” Pam Akers said. “I still feel like I’m in a dream. Only this time it’s a good dream; it’s not my nightmare I’ve lived for 4 1/2 years.”
Michael Devlin, 41, a pizza shop worker who moonlighted at a funeral home, was jailed on $1 million bail on a single kidnapping charge. Investigators say more charges are possible.
Publicly, the authorities marveled at the rescue of two teens kidnapped four years and 40 miles apart, one of them all but given up for dead.
The path to finding Shawn, now 15, began when Ben turned up missing Monday after a school bus dropped him near his home. A friend of Ben’s told police that a white pickup with a camping shell sped away about the time Ben disappeared.
Kirkwood police saw the truck, obtained a search warrant and wrote the uncommonly happy ending.
Akers, who is Shawn’s stepfather, told reporters gathered in an elementary school gym what it was like when he laid eyes on the gangly teenager with floppy hair, a hooded sweat shirt and a pierced lip.
“The last time we saw him, he was yay tall and 11 years old. It kind of throws you for a second,” said Akers, who once quit his job to start the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation to help missing children.
Akers said he felt Shawn would probably be all right when the boy asked, as they drove home after midnight to a throng of ecstatic relatives and well-wishers, if they could stop at McDonald’s.
Little is publicly known about the life Shawn led after he vanished or whether he made an effort to try to escape. As Shawn sat close by, smiling and occasionally hugging his mother, Akers said the whirlwind had left them no time to question him, adding that they did not want to press him for answers before he was ready.
Akers said Shawn has not attended school for four years. He also said Shawn had spotted benches laminated with his missing-person poster. In fact, the teen told him that a picture intended to show how Shawn might have aged since his kidnapping was an “insult.”
Neighbors said Shawn was not physically held captive. He lived with Devlin on the ground floor of a modest apartment complex adjacent to a railroad track. Residents said they often spotted Shawn out and about, visiting friends on his bike or playing video games with the apartment door open.
For the Akers family, Shawn’s return capped a four- year stretch in which his absence took over their lives. They dropped everything to search for him when he vanished, exhausting their savings in pursuit of the clue that would take them to him.
They paid psychics, they helped coordinate search teams, and they followed uncounted leads, many with gruesome connections, but none to Shawn. They kept his room as he had left it, now finding he long ago outgrew the clothes neatly folded in the drawers.
As time passed, they devoted themselves to tracking other missing children. Yet they never gave up hope that Shawn would beat the odds.
“I want to give that hope to the families … that their kids can come home,” Pam Akers told reporters. “It may be years later, it may be days later, it may be weeks later, but they can come home safe.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
