Pastor and son made ‘no wrong turns’ en route to rescuing kids

By Tony Gonzalez

Published: October 6, 2008

The voices of two children in the George Washington National Forest sounded like birds to Scott Reese.

“In the moments of quiet I would yell at the top of my lungs in one direction and my son in the other,” the 44-year-old pastor of Goshen Baptist and Miller Memorial churches said. “We went like that for three hours. We finally heard what we thought might be a voice. It sounded like a bird.”

Then came the sound of “hello” and “help.”

“When we finally got down, we cut through a valley, and the kids were at the bottom of a creek bed with a steep mountain on one side and a cliff on the other,” the pastor said.

Three hours after joining the search for Zen Ezra Phelan Darby, 8, and Khari Dawn Hatfield, 11, Reese’s son, Blake, 18, helped the uninjured children from a creek bed Monday afternoon. The children had been missing for nearly 22 hours.

“After a solid three-hour hike with no wrong turns, we were led right to them,” Scott Reese said.

The father-and-son team snapped a cell phone photo with the children and brought them nearly three miles to a waiting medical crew.

“Oh my goodness, they were non-stop talking,” Scott Reese said. “Jabbering and jabbering and jabbering.”

The pastor said families of the missing children gave him and his son all they needed in return: hugs and handshakes.

The men started their search in the morning after a church member called, asking for prayers.

“He said, ‘Please pray.’ I said, ‘I’ll do better than that,’ ” Scott Reese said.

The minister and his son packed water, sandwiches and protein and did not sign in with a search team.

“We had a prayer that God would guide us,” Scott Reese said, “and we just took off into the woods.”