The boy who cried Great Wolf Lodge: Teen accused of faking his abduction found at waterslide park

The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department went into high gear in a search for a 16-year-old boy they believed was abducted last Thursday, only to find him a day later hanging out on the waterslides at the Great Wolf Lodge.

Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer tells KIRO Radio’s Ron & Don Show that the scene officers found on Thursday had everyone worried that something serious had happened to the young man. He says a neighbor found the boy’s car running with his cell phone and schoolwork still inside. There were also social media messages sent from the boy that caused alarm.

“It turns out he had sent out some Twitter messages that he was being followed home from the store and some friends came forward and thought something had happened to him – he’d been abducted,” said Troyer. “So we ramped up a lot of people and our team and got out there.”

By around 1 a.m. Troyer says they began to question the scene surrounding the boy’s car. They found video footage of him at a gas station that didn’t seem to match up with him being abducted.

“About midnight, 1 o’clock in the morning we were able to figure out he had, in fact, voluntarily left, got in a car and got a ride to Yelm. And that’s where he disappeared.”

Authorities located the person the boy got a ride with. Troyer says it was just a random woman who didn’t know him.

“He asked a random lady if he could get a ride to Yelm. The lady agreed. He said he wanted to go see a relative. She agreed to give him a ride, not knowing who he was or the fact that he was taking off or had staged any of this,” says Troyer. “It’s pretty rural Pierce County, so out of the goodness of her heart she gave him a ride to a gas station-store area in Yelm and dropped him off.”

Prior to this discovery, the department had released the boy’s image to the media and that prompted more sightings and updates in the case.

“Somebody recognized his picture down at the Great Wolf Lodge and found him inside going down the waterslides,” says Troyer. “He’d bought a day pass and he’d been in there hanging out, going down the slides.”

Troyer says Chehalis Tribal Police responded to the report Friday and when they found the boy he admitted who he was and said he left his cell phone behind on purpose because he knew he could be tracked. He reportedly had slept in a lobby area at the Great Wolf Lodge and bought a waterslide pass in the morning, spending a long day enjoying the attractions before he was caught.

The search for the teen cost authorities an estimated $25,000, according to Troyer, who says they called out all the resources at their disposal to find him.

“You’ve got to look at everybody’s time. We have something called the CART team, a child abduction response team. I was waking people up at 10:30 at night getting people on computers, getting people to do video tracking. We had German Shepherds out there. We had bloodhound search dogs, and we actually started our pilots on the way to the plane just in case he was in the woods. We were going to use our heat-seeking stuff to make sure he wasn’t off somewhere rural and hurt.”

Troyer says there are hundreds of hours of manpower that go into a search like this and rightfully so.

“When we think something is real like that, we are going to ramp up and do everything we can to find a lost kid,” says Troyer. “Every single resource we have, every single person who’s available is going to respond and we’re going to continue to do that. That is why we need these fake things not to happen.”

The teen could end up facing charges for a false report of a crime.

Troyer says they don’t want to see false reports like this leading to a slower response when there is a real abduction case.

“We don’t want this to become a trend because you start hearing about it and you become cynical and when a kid or small child or girl gets abducted, we need people to listen and we need their help,” says Troyer. “It’s like the boy who cries wolf, you start hearing something too many times, you stop listening to it.”