Search for missing boys in the Bahamas

Wednesday, October 8, 2003

FREEPORT, Bahamas - According to the Miami Herald, Bahamian police cordoned off a wooded lot and brought in two U.S. ''cadaver dogs'' Monday in what appeared to be a major breakthrough in the search for five schoolboys who have disappeared over the past five months.

Authorities also detained more people, including a 12-year-old boy whose apartment borders the roped-off stand of pine trees. According to his family, the boy was a close friend of the first child to disappear in May.

Assistant Commissioner Ellison Greenslade said officers targeted the area ``based on its evidentiary value.''

''As of this moment, the investigations into the case of the five missing boys have progressed to a stage where we are now focused in a particular direction,'' Greenslade said. ``Our responses are now very specific, and distinct. We have a number of persons in custody.''

Greenslade declined to answer any questions or say how many people were in custody.

Government spokesman Gregory Christie said the two cadaver dogs from Riviera Beach police in Palm Beach County were brought in Monday.

The disappearances of the five ''packing boys,'' so called because all but one bagged groceries for tips at the same supermarket, have shaken this resort town of Freeport, the Bahamas' second-largest city and tourist destination.

The first three boys disappeared in May -- Jake Grant, 13, Mackinson Colas, 12, and Deangelo McKenzie, 13. The fourth, Junior Reme, who was born in the Bahamas to Haitian parents, vanished in late July.

The last to disappear, Desmond Rolle, 14, went missing Sept. 28, sometime after finishing a shift bagging groceries.

Since the disappearances began, police and hundreds of volunteers have searched the 100-mile-long island of Grand Bahama but have found nothing.

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