'Missing' Lake Zurich child found safe at home

It's a story parents of one 6-year-old Lake Zurich boy will likely recall with amusement years down the road.

But for more than an hour Wednesday morning, they were living their worst nightmare.

Police officers -- nine from Lake Zurich and more from several neighboring departments -- along with a helicopter unit and Lake Zurich public works staffers mobilized in search of a missing child, who turned out not to be missing.

The boy's parents called police at 7:58 a.m. when they didn't find their son in bed or anywhere in their home in the Braemar subdivision. They had not seen their child since 8 p.m. Tuesday.

"We take this very seriously," Lake Zurich Deputy Police Chief Patrick Finlon said. "We mobilized our whole department over there."

Police turned the family's home upside-down three times looking for the child. The parents also had searched the house top to bottom, Finlon said.

"There was no indication of foul play, forced entry or anything like that," he said.

Neighbors were alerted to be on the lookout for the boy.

Lake Zurich called for help from mutual-aid agencies, including Wauconda, Kildeer, Lincolnshire and Vernon Hills police departments. Officials set up a staging area in the neighborhood for the rescue effort and started preparing to circulate the boy's photo.

"We had a lot of manpower dedicated to this search because we didn't know if the child was walking around in the area," Finlon said.

A foot and air search of the neighborhood was about to begin when the boy's mother noticed fake toy fingers for Halloween peeking out from underneath the dining room tablecloth.

Attached to them was the boy, who had fallen asleep stretched over two dining room chairs with the tablecloth draped over him.

He did not stir, even with all the commotion around him.

Lake Zurich police get a handful of missing children reports a year, but none ever get this far, Finlon said.

The hullabaloo over the boy's perceived disappearance shows just how prepared police are, he said.

"We did all the things that we train for in terms of requesting assistance from other agencies and getting resources from air support," Finlon said. "Every minute counts when this type of issue occurs or you think it occurred. It was a very good exercise in terms of making sure that we knew what we were doing."