By JEFFERSON WEAVER

The yellow ribbons are forgotten now.

You can find a few wisps of fiber that are frayed and mixed in with the trash along the side of N.C. 24. The ribbons are forgotten like the little boy they symbolized.

Once upon a time, they marked every utility pole and signpost for miles. They were put up because of a little kid named Tristan Myers, better known as Buddy.

Buddy Myers would have been 10 this year. Since I don’t know little kids that well, I don’t know how much he would resemble the 4-year-old who disappeared on this date in 2000.

Buddy was one of the 876,213 people who disappeared in the year 2000, according to the FBI. His body was not among the 1,091 unidentified people that were recovered that year, or the 973 similar bodies found the next year, when another 840,279 people were reported missing.

There is a certain emotionless comfort in numbers like those; one doesn’t see faces or families in numbers. It’s hard to pick out a single pair of eyes or a dimpled chin or a blonde cowlick in a group of numbers larger than some states.

But Buddy was a heck of a lot more than a number to many of us.

Buddy probably would have been a Cub Scout; considering where he lived, he could have played baseball, football and soccer. Parents and coaches in that town coordinate schedules for all three sports.

He might have ridden a bicycle to school by now. He might have had his heart broken for the first time by a little girl.

But Buddy disappeared, and as far as anybody knows, he never got to do any of the things little boys should be able to do.

His Great-Aunt Donna took Buddy in when no one else could care for him.

She and her husband gave him a nice home near Roseboro, a place where he could play with his dogs and visit the horses across the way.

It’s on a long dirt road, and the Myers home is about midway down. On Oct. 5, 2000, there were only two or three houses and a few barns.

My editor sent me there at 11:30 on a Thursday night to cover the story.

My heart made me stay until 10 p.m. that Saturday.

I had been on several searches before, and had written about many more. I had seen families reunited, runaways spanked (they couldn’t hide from Sparky the Search Dog), and a teenaged boy’s corpse dredged from a popular swimming hole.

But it took the disappearance of a little kid who couldn’t get a break to get to me.

Buddy might have wondered, if little kids think of such things, if anybody loved him.

His mom was a stripper with a drug habit. She gave him to his grandma who came down with cancer and passed him on to Donna. Raven, as Buddy’s mom was known, was later thrown from a moving truck and killed in Fayetteville.

When Buddy came along, Donna and her husband had already raised their own kids and sent them out into the world. Still, they took Buddy in.

Buddy was like many a little boy who grows up in the South. He loved racing, wrestling, and his dogs.

His dogs were with him when he disappeared.
Dozens of men and women searched for him that first night.

Some of the searchers laughed, some grumbled at the bugs, some cursed when they walked into thorns, but all of them called out for Buddy.

Their voices were a cacophony, not a chorus, repeating a one-word refrain shouted over the sounds of ATVs and trucks and horses. I can still hear those voices sometimes.

Dozens of volunteers turned into hundreds within 36 hours, and over a thousand by the second full day.

Helicopters buzzed in and out. Everywhere you looked, there were trackers, search dogs, and scuba divers.

People avoided talking with the dive teams.

Everyone knew the divers weren’t hunting for a little boy. They were searching for a body.

We wanted Buddy alive.

I was both a searcher and a reporter.

We have a picture of me from that day. I am hand-writing a story to be called in via one of the cellphones hanging from my belt. A large hunting knife is strapped to the other side, and my forearms are briar-scratched and sunburned.

People who couldn’t search brought food and water and sleeping bags to an old car dealership, which the owner reopened as a command center.

We were hopeful, since Buddy had his two faithful dogs with him. People who specialize in missing persons cases will tell you dogs rarely abandon their masters unless the master is dead.

The dogs showed up that Sunday afternoon.

It was a day my editor, my wife and my parents told me I had to get away from it.

Mother said she’d cover the only thing happening, a press conference. It was being handled by someone named Monica Caison.

Mother was the one who spotted the dogs as they came home. There was never again a real lead on Buddy.

There was a brief moment of hope when Eli Quick was found. He was a little boy with a hard-to-explain past who bore a startling resemblance to Buddy. But Eli was Eli, not Buddy.

In the time it took me to write this column, two people will disappear. Depending on how fast you read it, six will vanish.

Monica Caison told me those numbers. Monica and I have remained friends since the search for Buddy.

Monica has become something of a celebrity since those days. She’s still the same intense person I met during the first week of October 2000.

A lot of other things have changed since then. My folks have passed away; my old editor has moved on. I myself have gone through some changes, most for the better.

Buddy’s dogs are both dead now, never having been reunited with their human. Buddy’s unopened presents from that first Christmas at Donna’s would hold no interest for a 10-year-old.

The yellow ribbons are forgotten now, faded and frayed like the memory of a lost little boy, but some of us who never met him can’t forget a boy called Buddy.

Weaver is a staff writer at The News Reporter. He may be reached via telephone at 642-4104, or via e-mail at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz.