The Kentucky toddler who disappeared while playing in his front yard while his dad was nearby at the time was found alive after three nights without any food or water.
According to WKYT, a search team heard the boy crying at the bottom of a 50-foot incline at a strip mine, about a mile from his Magoffin-Floyd County home.
One of the crew members who found the boy told “Good Morning America“:
“We all got quiet and started calling the child’s name, and at different times, sporadically, he would give us a cry and we had to try to pinpoint his location. We got three or four cries from him, and two of the guys made their way back up the hill and he was sitting up at top of a little flat there.”
Rescue teams had to use a rope and basket to pull the boy from a rugged hill in rural Kentucky on Wednesday.
Watch crews load Kenneth onto a helicopter in the video below:
An official told WKYT:
“(He went) over terrain, I would not, in fact I can’t, even as a young man I don’t think I’d even attempt it. That child is a true Kentucky mountain boy.”
As previously reported by Dearly, Kenneth Howard was conscious and “in remarkably good condition,” said the Magoffin County Sheriff’s Department.
The boy’s family was said to be equally amazed that he survived the ordeal. Elden Howard, Kenneth’s father told the outlet he was in:
“Disbelief, for a while. ‘Til they told me they were sure it was him, and stuff, and I’d seen a picture. I saidthat’s my boy.’ Tickled me to death. Best thing that ever happened to me in my life.”
Somehow the little boy managed to wander 1,755 feet away from his home in difficult terrain.
Kenneth’s mother, Tasha Howard, said the days leading up to her son’s rescue have been extremely challenging. She told sister station WSAZ:
“It’s been difficult, difficult. But I never did give up, ’cause I had faith. I had faith, and I know God is with us because we wouldn’t have found him.”
Hundreds of people helped search for the toddler, a Magoffin County Emergency Management official said:
“It was a team effort. We were guided there by God’s hands.”
Police are investigating how the boy disappeared from his home in Eastern Kentucky on Sunday evening.
Besides being dehydrated, Kenneth appears to be in good health.
Watch the video below: