Boy Kidnaped in ’84 Found and Reunited With Parents

A teen-ager who disappeared four years ago from a lakeside resort in Northern California was reunited with his parents Thursday at a sheriff’s station in Victorville, authorities said.

San Bernardino County sheriff’s investigators found the 17-year-old unharmed and in good condition Wednesday afternoon at the Apple Valley home of Patrick Micheal McCleery, 40, who was arrested on suspicion of kidnaping, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman said.

Until Thursday’s tearful reunion, the only contact the family had with their son was one phone call a year in which he would say, “I’m alive” and hang up, his mother said.

“We are very relieved--he’s alive and well,” she said.

The boy’s parents drove 10 hours from Lake County to join their son in this Mojave Desert community.

“I never gave up hope, never,” the mother said.

The boy was 13 years old when he was last seen in July, 1984. McCleery was an acquaintance of the family and had been living in a trailer near Clear Lake, where the boy’s father manages a marina.

“One day, McCleery rented a boat from them, and that was the last they saw of him or their son,” said Dale Sharp, a San Bernardino County sheriff’s detective.

An investigation failed to determine the boy’s whereabouts, and Lake County authorities classified the case as “missing person/suspicious circumstances,” Sharp said.

The search in San Bernardino County began Wednesday when the boy’s mother reported that she had received an anonymous telephone call from a person who gave her an Apple Valley phone number where her son could be reached, Sharp said.

The phone number turned out to be incorrect. But investigators then began canvassing homes and businesses with the same telephone prefix in a remote section of Apple Valley, about 75 miles northeast of Los Angeles, Sharp said.

The boy was found in a “camping-style trailer” used as a residence by McCleery, who was described by authorities as a “self-employed handyman” in the high-desert area.

Sharp said interviews with the boy suggested that he could have escaped at times during his four years with McCleery “but circumstances prevented him from doing so,” Sharp said.

“The suspect had gained the boy’s trust,” he said.

Sharp said he expected the case to be turned over to the district attorney’s office today.

He also said the boy had “not progressed much” over the years.

“He still seems to be 13 in his mind,” he said.

His mother described her son’s appearance as “pretty scroungy . . . he has long dirty hair.”