LOWEL – Harry Kkonde, a missing 3-year-old boy from Lowell, was found dead in shallow water the day after he was reported missing from his nanny’s home and a mass search began.
Harry’s body was found Wednesday afternoon, more than a day after he disappeared from Frede Lane’s house in the Potoketville area on Tuesday.
He was found by a U.S. police diving team in a pond near his Lowell home. The lake was searched on Tuesday and Harry was not found. A day later, police checked the area again, as the boy was believed to be on the move.
Harry wore the clothes he was last seen in and was found in about five feet of water. There were no signs of trauma on his body.
“It’s obviously every parent’s worst nightmare,” Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said Wednesday.
Investigators said Harry was left at home Tuesday morning. A neighbor saw him playing in the yard around 9:15 a.m. About 15 minutes later, the babysitter called 911 to report that Harry was missing.
“We have a very narrow window on when he disappeared,” Carlisle Police Chief John Fisher, commander of the incident in the Northeast Massachusetts Regional Law Enforcement Response Team, told reporters Wednesday morning.
Fisher said this was Harry’s fifth visit with the babysitter, and it looks like he went out the door alone. The babysitter was looking after another child at the time, Fisher said.
Two different police dogs smelled Harry, and they headed in the same direction toward the woods behind the house. Harry was last seen wearing a long-sleeved maroon shirt and gray pants with a white stripe on them.
Police do not suspect unfair play and treat it as a search for a lost child. Fisher said they had begun a search of the home and expanded it in all directions on Wednesday in nearby State Forest and Tingsboro. About 200 people were involved, and Fisher added that the FBI’s Rapid Child Abduction Team had also offered help.
About 180 officers from several police stations searched the area throughout Tuesday. People living in the neighborhood were asked to check their surveillance videos, bell cameras, property and cars.
“We don’t have it on video,” Fisher said Wednesday, noting that the boy’s size may not have triggered the bell’s camera. “We have the footage, we don’t have it.”
Ryan said her department would now shift its focus from finding Harry to finding out.
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