Family's Ordeal Ends as Missing Son Comes Home

By Kari Lydersen and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 14, 2007

KIRKWOOD, Mo., Jan. 13 -- Somehow, after all the dashed hopes and dead ends, after four years of fruitlessly searching forests and mine shafts and Internet bulletin boards, Craig and Pam Akers still expected they would hear news of their kidnapped son.

They just never expected the news would be this good.

The cellphone rang Friday afternoon as the couple drove home from work through a cold sleet. The county prosecutor was on the line. He advised them to pull over, and their hearts began to pound.

"The next words were, 'We're 95 percent sure we've found Shawn and he's alive,' " Craig Akers said Saturday. "Those were the sweetest words I ever heard in my life."

Police found Shawn Hornbeck, now 15, alive and seemingly well on Friday when they searched a suburban St. Louis apartment for a second kidnapped boy, Ben Ownby, a 13-year-old snatched early last week on his way home from school.

Both boys appeared healthy and at ease during news conferences Saturday, smiling as cameras flashed. Their parents did the talking, speaking of prayers answered and asking for privacy to let it all sink in.

"Shawn is a miracle here," Pam Akers said. "I still feel like I'm in a dream. Only this time it's a good dream, it's not my nightmare I've lived for 4 1/2 years."

Authorities charged Michael Devlin, 41, a pizza shop worker who moonlights at a funeral home, with one count of kidnapping but revealed little of what they know. Publicly, they marveled at the rescue of two teenagers kidnapped four years and 40 miles apart, one of them all but given up for dead.

Franklin County Sheriff Gary Toelke summed up the mood when he told reporters, "We have some good news, and we have some probably unbelievable news."

The path to finding Shawn, kidnapped in 2002 while riding his bike near his home in Richwoods, began when Ben turned up missing on Monday after a school bus dropped him off near his home in rural Beaufort. A friend of Ben's told police that a white pickup truck with a camper shell sped away on the gravel road at about the time Ben disappeared.

Kirkwood police saw the truck, obtained a search warrant and wrote the uncommonly happy ending. The boys met their disbelieving families at the sheriff's department. Devlin, raised and schooled nearby, was already under arrest.

Akers, who is Shawn's stepfather, told reporters gathered in an elementary school gym what it was like when he laid eyes on the gangly teenager with floppy hair, a hooded sweatshirt and a pierced lip.

"The last time we saw him, he was yay tall and 11 years old. It kind of throws you for a second," said Akers, who once quit his software-design job to start the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation to help missing children. "Once I saw the face, I said, 'Oh my god, that's my son.' "

Akers said he thought Shawn was probably going to be all right when he asked, as they drove home after midnight to a throng of ecstatic relatives and well-wishers, if they could stop at McDonald's.

Little is publicly known about the life Shawn led after he vanished or whether he made an effort to try to escape. As Shawn sat close by, smiling and occasionally hugging his mother, Akers said the whirlwind had left the family no time to question him, adding that they do not want to press him for answers before he is ready.

Akers did say that Shawn has not attended school for four years. He also said Shawn had spotted benches laminated with his missing-person poster. In fact, the boy told his stepfather that a picture intended to show how he might have aged since his kidnapping was an "insult."

Neighbors said Shawn was not physically held captive. He lived with Devlin on the ground floor of a modest apartment complex next to a railroad track. Residents said they often spotted Shawn out and about, visiting friends on his bicycle or playing video games with the apartment door open.

"Most people here tend to live by making it one day to another. I never thought beyond my wildest dreams that this was happening here," said Teddy Wilson, 56, a lawn and feed store worker, who said he saw last week's alert for the white pickup but did not put two and two together. "I'm kicking myself for not noticing sooner."

Tom Garner, who lives with a roommate upstairs from Devlin, described him as irritable and said he often heard loud banging, as though someone were punching the walls. He said he twice knocked on Devlin's door to ask him to quiet down.

Devlin and Shawn each answered the door once and told him that nothing was amiss, said Garner, 49. He also said he once heard what he described as whimpering.

Neighbor Krista Jones, 25, said Devlin became angry whenever someone parked in his spot and sometimes summoned the police.

"The guy was rude. He had a conflict with everyone here because of a parking spot," Jones said.

She described Shawn as quiet, with a preference for black clothing and piercings, and said he occasionally drove Devlin's truck.

For the Akers family, Shawn's return ended four years in which his absence took over their lives. They dropped everything to search for him, exhausting themselves and their savings in pursuit of clues that would lead them to him.

They paid psychics, helped coordinate search teams and followed countless leads, many of them with gruesome connections, but none to Shawn. They kept his room as he had left it, now finding that he long ago outgrew the clothes neatly folded in the drawers.

As time passed, they devoted themselves to tracking other missing children. In one case, Craig Akers lived for weeks in a camper, joining a search for a Missouri teenager. His leg hurt, but he ignored the pain until it became excruciating. The day after he returned home, doctors diagnosed vascular disease and amputated his leg at the knee.

Yet the Akerses said they never gave up hope that Shawn would beat the odds and the clock.

"I want to give that hope to the families . . . that their kids can come home," Pam Akers told reporters. "It may be years later, it may be days later, it may be weeks later, but they can come home safe. And just always keep that faith."

They expressed disappointment and astonishment that, as they were expanding their appeals, eventually across the country, Shawn was living less than an hour's drive away.

"It's just hard to believe that somebody could be that brazen," Craig Akers said.

"It just boggles my mind that someone thinks they can get away with it. Obviously, they do. It's been going on for four years, and he's been right here under our noses the whole time."

Slevin reported from Chicago.