Lost Boy Dies After Night in Angeles Forest

A 12-year-old Hesperia boy who wandered away from a church group during an outing in the San Gabriel Mountains in the Angeles Forest died Sunday, just hours after rescuers found him partially frozen under a blanket of snow on a narrow ridge where he had spent the night.

After an all-night search in dense fog, snow and strong winds, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department rescue team found Ruben Allred at 10:25 a.m. after spotting a tuft of his blond hair sticking out of a “little mound of snow” about a mile from where he was last seen, Sheriff’s Sgt. Gordon Carn said.

The boy was face down, arms pulled tightly to his sides, hands clutching his light cotton jacket close to his chest. He was clad only in the jacket, jeans and tennis shoes, the sergeant said.

“Judging from the snow built up around the boy,” Carn said, “he probably tried to tuck himself in at about 12 (midnight) to 2 o’clock.”

The youngster had not been seen since about 3:30 p.m. Saturday in a play area near Ski Sunrise, a resort about five miles from Wrightwood. But his absence went unnoticed until 6:30 p.m., when his mother--who had been at the church preparing for an evening dinner and dance--discovered that her son had not returned with the rest of the group.

The seventh-grader’s disappearance prompted an intense search-and-rescue effort that involved as many as 90 law enforcement officers and volunteers from Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

Rescuers fanned out over a 30-square-mile area to look for Ruben. They finally found him on a ridge along Table Mountain, where a foot of snow had fallen Saturday night during the season’s worst storm.

The child was taken by helicopter to Antelope Valley Hospital Medical Center in Lancaster, where doctors said he showed no signs of breathing, had no pulse, no heartbeat and a body temperature that had fallen below 60 degrees--too cold for them to determine if he was alive.

About an hour later, he was transferred by helicopter to UCLA Medical Center in Westwood, where died at 2:30 p.m.

Authorities said Ruben’s death came on the heels of another tragedy in his family--his father died two months ago of a heart attack.

A student at Hesperia Junior High School, Ruben had gone to the mountains Saturday afternoon with about 200 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the small town of Phelan, near San Bernardino. The church members broke up into smaller groups of five or six children, each group with an adult supervisor.

Carn said that about 3:30 p.m. Ruben told his supervisor he was too cold to continue playing and wanted to walk back to the car, parked about 100 yards from the play site.

“He probably started in the right direction and something happened, he got sidetracked or who knows, and he just started walking in the wrong direction,” Carn said.

When the supervisor did not find Ruben at the car, he mistakenly assumed the boy had gone home in another carload of church members.

When the cars started returning to the church, Carol Allred began wondering where her son was, said Randy Wilkerson, a church official.

When they could not locate the boy at the church, congregation members notified authorities and drove back to the mountains to begin looking for him. Some joined in the search-and-rescue effort, Carn said.

But foul weather hampered the search.

“Between 2 and 5 a.m. we had strong winds, snow and dense fog, and visibility was extremely limited,” Carn said. “We’re talking maybe three or four feet visibility. . . . The weather was a real big factor.”

A volunteer search-and-rescue team from the Malibu sheriff’s station finally discovered Ruben. Carn said the boy was so deeply covered in snow that it is possible rescuers passed by him during the night but did not spot him.

Rescuers administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation and felt a slight pulse, Carn said. They radioed a helicopter that, carefully avoiding the surrounding trees, landed on the ridge.

The helicopter’s pilot, Deputy Robert Flores, said he flew the boy to a nearby Caltrans maintenance yard, where he was transferred to a paramedic helicopter and taken to the hospital in Lancaster.

Fred Auerbach, director of emergency services at the hospital, said the youngster was diagnosed as having hypothermia--a considerable drop in body temperature. He compared the boy’s condition to that of people who are submerged in icy waters for a long period of time.

Doctors attempted to warm his body by placing warm fluids in his abdomen, but Auerbach said the boy “did not improve substantially” during the emergency treatment and that his only hope for survival was to be hooked up to a heart-lung machine that could warm his blood and recirculate it through his body.

Lacking the proper equipment to treat the boy, doctors decided to transfer Ruben to UCLA. There, doctors continued resuscitation efforts and considered connecting him to the heart-lung machine, but the youngster succumbed.

Hypothermia produces many of the signs of death: icy skin, stiff limbs and an undetectable heartbeat. Although the condition results solely from exposure to extreme cold, degrees and forms of hypothermia vary.

“The average body temperature is 98.6 (degrees Fahrenheit). Anything below 95 degrees is definitely hypothermic,” said Dr. David Wagner, a senior resident in the emergency ward of County-USC Medical Center.

The most dangerous form of the condition results when hypothermia develops slowly, said Dr. Steve Campbell, a UCLA Medical Center physician who supervised the treatment of Ruben. In such an instance, he said, ice crystals often form in the cells.

Times staff writers Darrell Dawsey and Janet Rae-Dupree contributed to this story.