Hmm, this piqued my interest, so I had a look at some child abduction stats...
The USA's NISMART studies seem to have the most data that I can find. The NISMART-2 appears to be the most comprehensive cycle available - which estimates that of all "caretaker missing" episodes (about 1.3 million annually), roughly 9% involved family abductions and 3% nonfamily abductions—for a total of ~12% human agency cases. (Note: These are episode based estimates, not just police reports, so they capture unreported cases too.)
Family abductions (the bulk of the 12%) disproportionately affect kids under 6, who made up 44% of victims despite being only ~11-12% of all missing children overall. Nonfamily cases skew older (mostly teens), but the very young tilt the overall abduction rate upward in that demographic.
For unresolved cases after weeks/months... Most missing episodes resolve quickly (e.g. 46% of family abductions last <1 week, and ~99% of all runaways return within a year), so abductions loom larger in the lingering pool - 21% of family abductions go a month+, with 6% still unresolved at survey time, versus near zero for benign "lost / injured" cases. Among long-term recoveries (6+ months), runaways are 97%, meaning the remaining ~3% (abductions, etc.) represent a much higher abduction proportion than the overall 12%.
Sources:
NISMART Overview (PDF)
NISMART Highlights Bulletin (PDF)
NISMART Family Abductions Report (PDF)
NCMEC Long-Term Missing Analysis (Webpage)
Caretaker missing episodes = the caretaker did not know where the child was, became alarmed for at least an hour, and looked for the child.
These are interesting stats, but not 100% relevant in this case. If anyone else has previously done any research into stats that would fit this case, I'd love to hear it, I just don't have the time to go through it all.
As for the odds of "
him coming upon a mineshaft hole 5.5 to 12 kilometers away from the homestead in any direction on a property so vast" as per
@statt#1, I'm not smart enough for that, I think we'd need to call in the big guns, like
@Total_C
But, I do think that sounds highly unlikely, UNLESS - unless he had previously been to the mineshaft with one of his family members, and become curious about it from that, which would make sense as he might remember how to get to it. However, I would think in that case, this hypothetical mineshaft would have been brought up by the family to police in the beginning. IMO.
I'm a bit late, I wasn't on in time yesterday to see this before LE finished searching the shafts, but I have permission from Total_C to post this awesome probability check:
"A simple probability check on the “wandered into a mineshaft” idea
I wanted to sanity-check the notion that a just-turned-4-year-old wandered off around 5 pm in late September and somehow ended up in one of six mine shafts located between 5.5 and 12 km from the homestead. This is purely geometry and physical limits.
1. How far a 4-year-old can realistically travel
To give this scenario every benefit of the doubt:
Walking speed for a small child in that terrain is roughly 2 km/h.
Maximum continuous movement before dark, cold and exhaustion is about 4 hours.
This gives an upper-limit straight-line radius of 8 km. That already assumes no stopping, no crying, no fear, no lying down, no looping, no terrain issues and perfect direction. Anything at 12 km is essentially out of physical reach.
2. Size of the actual target
Even being generous, if each shaft is roughly 5 m by 5 m, that is 25 m² of surface opening per shaft.
Six shafts give a combined “danger zone” of about 150 m².
3. Area the child could be in
A circle with an 8 km radius covers:
π × 8000² ≈ 201,000,000 m²
Now compare that with the combined 150 m² footprint of the shafts.
150 divided by 201,000,000 ≈ 0.00000075
That equals about 0.000075 per cent, or roughly one chance in 1.3 million.
This is already using extremely favourable assumptions for the shaft scenario.
4. Real behaviour makes the odds even lower
Four-year-olds almost never walk in a continuous straight line for hours. They wander, turn back, sit, hide, cry, freeze from fear or darkness and are slowed by terrain. All of this reduces the realistic radius, not increases it. Which means the shafts at 5.5 to 12 km lie well outside typical child-wander distances.
5. What this means once you add the known behaviour
The maths alone makes the “wandered into a distant shaft” scenario microscopic. But when you place that next to the post-incident family behaviour, which many have noted as atypical for a missing-child situation, it becomes even harder to support the wander-off theory.
The elements most people find unusual are:
• delayed reporting timeline
• hostility toward media contact
• communicating only through intermediaries
• unusual living arrangements, with the father living elsewhere from the mother and children
• complete absence from media appeals or public pleas for assistance
Individually, some of these could be explained away. Taken together, they form a pattern that does not align with what we normally see in genuine missing-child incidents where families desperately seek attention, exposure and help.
When you combine the statistical improbability with the behavioural context, the “wandered off and fell into a distant shaft” explanation becomes extraordinarily weak.
From a numbers standpoint alone, it simply does not hold weight."
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