A 14-year-old boy with a cognitive disability was reunited with his family Sunday after a driver found him walking alone and called 911, according to the Wake County Sheriff’s Office.
The driver stopped to check on the teen, who was at the intersection of Poole and Hodge roads southeast of Raleigh at about 11:30 a.m. The boy was nonverbal, according to the sheriff’s office, and the driver called for help.
Sheriff’s deputies responded and took the boy to WakeMed Children’s Hospital as a precaution. He was in good health, but authorities did not know his name or where he lived.
So deputies asked Wake County Emergency Management to issue a community alert through the county’s ReadyWake system, which sends text, phone or email messages to people who subscribe. The alert went out about 12:15 p.m. to about 50,000 people in a five-mile radius of where the boy was found.
Deputies also drove around nearby neighborhoods, stopping to talk to whoever they saw, according to sheriff’s spokeswoman Rosalia Fodera. It was that way that the boy was reunited with his family, Fodera said.
The sheriff’s office is still investigating how the boy ended up alone.
The sheriff’s office has not released the names of the boy or the driver but did send out a press release to praise the driver.
“We want to thank the driver who stopped to check on this child for being vigilant and quickly notifying us,” it said.