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‘We did everything in our power’, cop says

BY Janis Ramsay, Staff November 07, 2008 12:11

Barrie Police know there’s going to be public scrutiny about their search of the Shanty Bay area, now that Brandon Crisp was found on Line 4 of Oro-Medonte.

The 15-year-old boy was found in a wooded area near a beaver pond Nov. 5, close to where both police and the public had searched.

“I know there’s going to be a lot of armchair quarterbacks who ask why we didn’t search wider, harder, longer. I’m confident and I’ll stay steadfast in the fact that everyone worked for 20-plus days and we’ve worked dozens of hours trying to bring Brandon home,” said media spokesperson, Sgt. Dave Goodbrand.

“We’re very upset about this, we had hoped for a happier ending.”

Officers will soon meet to discuss the search strategy, but Goodbrand said he doesn’t think officers have had the opportunity to look at the GPS maps yet.

“That will be something we’ll be doing to see where we were.”

It’s a very dense area, and Goodbrand said it’d take some time to figure out if police had already looked there.

“I felt we conducted a thorough search, but we focused our search around the 2nd and 3rd lines because it was the only solid information we had of his location.”

Brandon Crisp went missing Monday, Oct. 13 and officers were told the next day.

Their ground search started the following weekend, but even then, police were only going by a witness account that had seen the yellow mountain bike along the Oro Rail Trail in Shanty Bay, said Goodbrand. The bike wasn’t found until Oct. 20.

For 10 days, police searched using a combination of K9, helicopter, ground and marine patrol, which didn’t find any further clues. Two witnesses had seen Brandon the day he left home, but no one else had seen him.

Investigators did everything they could do to locate Brandon with the limited information they had, said Goodbrand.

“We just can’t randomly search all of Ontario.

“Of course, people are going to question is there anything we could’ve done differently. Well, I think everyone wants to focus on what we did wrong, instead of what we did right. We’re in the business to take that criticism and we’ve got tough skin, but the point is we did everything in our power to bring Brandon home safe to his family.”

Another criticism of the police involved why it took so long to make Brandon’s disappearance public. It took four days for Brandon to be reported as a missing child on the Barrie Police Service website.

Goodbrand said each report of a missing child is done on a case-by-case basis, and in the beginning, Brandon left home because of a fight. It wasn’t believed to be a case of a child abduction.

“The missing person page on our website isn’t for every chronic runaway. We save that for missing persons where it’s out of character or there is a concern for safety.

“That’s why there’s very few people on that. If we do it for every missing kid that runs away every week and then returns home, it is a 'boy-who-cried-wolf' syndrome. The public becomes desensitized.”

Brandon’s situation didn’t meet criteria for an Amber Alert because he wasn’t reported abducted.

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