By The Canadian Press

Body of Missing 2 Year Old Boy Found in Creek

Mar 26, 2016 | 4:48 PM

Austin, Manitoba:   The body of Chase Martens, a two-year-old boy who went missing from his rural Manitoba home earlier this week, was found in a nearby creek on Saturday afternoon, RCMP confirm.

The toddler had gone missing from his family’s farm home near Austin, Man., about 120 kilometres west of Winnipeg, on Tuesday evening.

His body was located by a group of Winnipeg search-and-rescue volunteers in a creek about half a kilometre south of the home at around 1 p.m. CT Saturday, said RCMP spokesperson Sgt. Bert Paquet.

“Earlier today a family, a community and a province’s worst nightmare became a reality,” Paquet told reporters later in the afternoon.

“This appears to be exactly what we all thought it was: a tragedy.”

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Paquet said it appears that Martens had wandered off and somehow ended up in the creek.

Thousands of volunteers joined with RCMP and search-and-rescue crews over the past few days in combing a four-kilometre radius from the location where Martens was last seen.

Paquet said the creek had been identified as a “high-probability area” and was searched several times throughout the week as water levels and other conditions changed.

An autopsy is expected to take place on Sunday. Paquet said no obvious signs of foul play have been identified at this time.

More than 500 volunteers had joined the search for Martens on Friday alone, scouring farm fields and wooded areas all day.

“I would estimate that about 30,000 volunteer hours were donated this week, the majority of them by people that are total strangers to the Martens family,” Paquet said.

“The true, genuine care and concern of Manitobans is something that should be recognized and commended. I know a family [and] a community thank you for the size of your collective heart.”

RCMP had been using surveillance drones to map out the search area and look for clues since Thursday. Dive teams searched in streams, ditches and ponds on Thursday and were back in the area Saturday.

Temperatures had fallen below 0 C each night since Martens went missing.

His parents, Thomas Martens and Destiny Turner, issued an emotional public plea on Thursday for any information that could help bring their son home.

On Saturday, Paquet said investigators have spoken with Martens’s family and they had “mixed feelings, obviously — an answer, yes, but probably the answer they did not want to get.”

“We always hope,” he added, “but we knew the challenges after the first few nights and we knew, obviously, the possible outcome of this operation.

“Again, an answer provided to the family thanks to the effort of thousands of people, but definitely not an answer anybody wanted to see.”