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Drivers find 3-year-old boy wandering in traffic

Traffic on busy Regency Park Boulevard was veering around the child, but not stopping, said one of the two drivers who scooped the lad up, unhurt.

PORT RICHEY - William Mason was headed up the road Tuesday morning when traffic slowed ahead on Regency Park Boulevard. In a moment, he realized what the holdup was.

"I looked and there was a little kid in the middle of the street," Mason said Wednesday. "Traffic going south kept going. They never even slowed up for him. The traffic going north, they slowed up some but they didn't stop."

Mason, 76, swung his van toward the center and stopped in the middle of the road. "I figured, well, you people ain't going to hit him with me sitting here," he said.

It was just after 10 a.m.

Meanwhile, Diana and Christopher Muir were lying in bed at their home on Ivanhoe Drive wondering when their 3-year-old son, Quade, would come get them.

"He usually plays video games and watches movies until he's ready for breakfast," Christopher Muir said. "Then we all get up."

Finally, Diana Muir, 27, got up to go make coffee and realized the back door was open and Quade was gone. After that, Christopher Muir said, came 10 minutes of terror.

They went outside and he wasn't in the back yard. He wasn't in the front yard, either. They checked a neighbor's house. Not there, either.

"We were both panicked," said Christopher Muir, 31. "I said, "You take the car. I'm going to call the police.' "

When he got a 911 operator on the line, she already had good news for him.

"He's safe," she told Muir. "He's right up at the corner."

As Mason pulled his van into the center of Regency Park Boulevard, a woman stopped her pickup truck in the opposite lane. Together they had traffic stopped in both directions.

Quade looked around to survey the traffic jam he had created. "He didn't look scared," Mason said. "He just looked lost. He looked bewildered."

Mason and the woman got out of their vehicles and looked at each other. "She said, "If I take the kid and put him in my truck, they're liable to get me for kidnapping,' " Mason said. "I said, "Well, you ain't got time to worry about that now."

She scooped Quade up and put him in her truck. Then she followed Mason, who called 911 from his van, onto a side street.

A Pasco sheriff's deputy and the Muirs arrived a few minutes later, separately.

"They come up and they hugged him and hugged the woman that had ahold of him in the truck," Mason said.

Diana Muir was clearly upset. But Quade was unmoved, Mason said. "He never cried, never fretted."

The deputy reported that there was no indication of any wrongdoing on the Muirs' part and requested that the case be cleared.

Christopher Muir said his son had apparently let himself out of their home on Ivanhoe and wandered alone down the street to the more heavily traveled Regency Park Boulevard.

Quade's brother had left for school not long beforehand.

"He said he was looking for his big brother," Muir said, "and he said he was chasing a butterfly."