Ian Ritch says he and his son often go for walks in North Carolina's Rankin Lake Park like they did Saturday. Maddox, 6, will regularly run ahead of his father, then slow down and wait for him to catch up.
Ian Ritch says he and his son often go for walks in North Carolina's Rankin Lake Park like they did Saturday. Maddox, 6, will regularly run ahead of his father, then slow down and wait for him to catch up.
But on Saturday, the boy, who has autism and is nonverbal, got too far ahead of Ian and hasn't been seen since. Ian says he "started panicking" when his 6-year-old son did not slow down and disappeared from view.
"We were walking on a track around the lake and he decided to take off from me. ... I didn’t think nothing of it and he got a little too far away from me," Ian Ritch told "Good Morning America" in an exclusive interview Wednesday. "As soon as I got to the point where I couldn’t see him anymore, I started panicking. I couldn’t see him anywhere."