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Ottawa

Half-dressed boy found wandering Barrhaven street

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CTV Ottawa: Man spots boy wandering in cold CTV's Joanne Schnurr reports on the half-naked boy found wandering in Barrhaven in freezing cold morning.

The Children's Aid Society is looking into a case involving a half-naked child wandering an Ottawa street early this morning.  The man who found the four-year-old says he can't get the image of the shivering little boy out of his mind.   The boy was spotted around 6:30 this morning on Grenadier Way, just off Woodroffe Avenue dressed in a jacket, boots and a diaper. Jose Reyes had just popped out to get a coffee and was driving to his home on Grenadier Way when he saw something that stopped him in his tracks.

"It's like a nightmare,” says Reyes, “I can't believe it.  I saw the kid right on the street.”

He called 9-1-1.

“It's an emergency.  I need to get police on scene right away,” he recalls telling police. “I spotted a little boy walking on the street.”

As Reyes called police, another woman stopped to help. The boy, clad in only a jacket, boots and a diaper was shivering in the sub-zero temperatures.

“The kid was very, very cold,” says Reyes.

And, he says, being pushed over by a very aggressive dog. Reyes grabbed the dog while the woman put the child in her car and waited for police.

“Very sad when I see that,” he says, “I remember I said where's the parents?”

The parents, it turns out, lived just half a block away. The mother didn't want to talk but did acknowledge the boy was her son and said he was fine.

Ottawa Police say there was at least one other child in the house.  The Children's Aid Society is now involved.  They will try to determine whether there is an ongoing risk to the child or whether this was just a mistake.

“We look through our files,” explains CAS Executive Director Barbara MacKinnon in explaining the process, “to see if there is a history of other calls (in situations like this) and see whether we need to offer support to the family, whether there is a risk to the child to see if we need to arrange alternate caregiving.”

Both the CAS and Ottawa Police say these cases happen more often than people think.

"We had another one this afternoon in the Orleans,” says Constable Marc Soucy with the Ottawa Police, “where a 10-year-old boy got out of the house just dressed in pajamas. Again a concerned citizen found him and called us and before we got to the scene the boy had returned home.”

For Jose Reyes, though, this is the first time he’s ever seen anything like this and he hopes it’s the last time.  He's got three children of his own, including a four year old boy, the same age as the child he found this morning.

Asked what he planned to do when he saw his kids tonight, Reyes said, “Give them a hug, yeah.”