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Search for missing son brings more questions
By ED QUIOCO and MOLLY MOORHEAD Maggie Felker expected one of two things to happen when she took a search group and their specially trained dogs to a vast national park in Ecuador to search for her missing son. Either the searchers, some from Pinellas and Pasco counties, would find the remains of her 21-year-old son, David Byrd-Felker. Or they would find nothing at all. But the Wisconsin mother was not prepared for what actually happened. During the 10-day trip, some of the search dogs seemed particularly interested in one area of the park. Then, in that same area, a child playing by a river found the skeletal remains of a left arm. It might or might not be David's arm. Only a DNA test can answer that question. "It was a very negative experience for me because it again put me at a situation where I had to move forward to get some answers about a very . . . ugly thing," Felker said Monday night. For the Tampa Bay volunteers, the mission was unforgettable. Felker enlisted a contingent of search and rescue specialists from different organizations and groups in the Tampa Bay area, South Florida and Georgia. One of the groups that sent members was the Dunedin-based K-9 Search and Rescue Teams of Florida. In addition to that team, the mission also included Hudson anesthetist Ron Wegner, who is on a U.S. Public Health Service disaster team but did not go in his government role, and Temple Terrace firefighter Marshia Hall, who lives in Dade City. "It was amazing what the team accomplished," Hall said. Local police, residents and newspapers gave them a tremendous reception. Local police officers told them they'd never seen or heard of dogs being used to search for humans. The search and rescue group started with 16 people and nine search dogs. They divided into small groups consisting of a local guide, a dog, its handler, and a technical person who handled navigation and the radio and oversaw the health of the group. The mission was challenging for some of the Florida searchers who are used to searching the state's flat terrain. The Amazon jungle, which has altitudes ranging from 3,300 feet to 11,880 feet, had steep, muddy trails that made for difficult hikes. "Steep plus mud equals slippery," Felker said. "It's just really very challenging." Even getting to the national park from where their plane had landed proved to be a little dicey. The roads were dirt roads that spiraled the mountainsides. "Those were all very rough roads, pretty scary stuff, around sides of mountains and the roads only wide enough for one vehicle," said Leslie Patterson, a member of the Dunedin-based group. "Luckily, it was at night so we didn't really notice." During the search, several of the dogs, including Kato, a German shepherd that belongs to Sharon Scavuzzo of Dunedin, seemed particularly interested in one small patch of forest, Patterson said. But they didn't find anything at first, and it was the local children who discovered the arm later. Felker, who accompanied the volunteers to South America, first tried to get the remains brought back to the United States, but U.S. and Ecuadorian officials would not allow it. For one thing, they said, the remains might belong to an Ecuardorian national. Instead, Felker decided to send the remains to the country's capital, Quito, so a Red Cross doctor can do the DNA analysis. That could take several weeks. But even getting the remains to Quito proved to be difficult since Ecuador is a "resource-poor country," she said. A local police officer who has worked with Felker is going to take the remains by bus to Quito, a trip that could take about 15 hours. "There were just a lot of details that I had to get involved in and people just expected me to get involved in because who else would do it," Felker said. David, a Wisconsin college student, visited Ecuador in February to spend a semester studying in Quito. While there, he taught street children how to read. He vanished more than three months ago. After an exhaustive search earlier this year, Felker and a private investigator she hired came up with clues that pointed to David traveling to Zamora, a small town south of Quito, to explore a 360,000-acre national park called Podocarpus. The main theory is that something happened to David while he was hiking on one of the trails in the mountainous Amazon jungle, which has numerous natural hazards such as steep terrain, poisonous snakes and other wild animals. About half of the search personnel and the dogs went home a few days early. The rest, including Felker, came home Sunday. For her, the trip did not provide the answers she was hoping to get. She now has to work out what she calls the "DNA-testing details." Instead of focusing on that, Felker, 51, said she would rather think about other aspects of the trip. For example, two Georgia police officers who went on the trip talked about possibly starting a police exchange program with Ecuadorian officers. If Felker could get something like that started, she said that would be a "really meaningful way" to thank the police officers in Zamora who helped her. "I would like the people who were so good to me and really honored me and my son by the extra efforts they put before me, I would like them to know the kind of resources available in the U.S. and learn how different things work," Felker said. "It would be a good way to honor them." Felker also spoke to Red Cross officials who talked about building a tourist information and accident-prevention center in her son's name in Zamora. The hope, she said, would be to prevent similar tragedies from happening to other families. "(Zamora) is a beautiful area with really nice people, but it's got a lot of dangerous things about nature," Felker said.
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