With B.C. boy Kienan Hebert home safe, questions now on how Mounties let abductor slip away

Aside from the massive sigh of relief that three-year-old Kienan Hebert's abductor returned the little boy home unharmed, people are wondering just how the suspect was able to stroll into the vacant family home in Sparwood, B.C., and leave the little boy there without anyone seeing it.

Such safe returns of kidnapped children are extremely rare, Ernie Allen, president of the Virginia-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, told the National Post.

"For an abductor to take a child in this manner — to penetrate the home, to come into the home, to take the child — and then return the child back to the home is in many ways unprecedented," Allen said. "We've worked thousands of these cases and I don't remember one like it."

Little Kienan disappeared from his bedroom overnight Wednesday. Initial reports suggested Kienan, who sometimes sleepwalks, might have wandered off himself. But the RCMP quickly concluded he was abducted, issued an Amber Alert and named Sparwood resident Randall Hopley as a suspect. Hopley had a criminal record, including a child sex offence.

But hours after police and the family issued an emotional plea for his safe return, Kienan was discovered early Sunday morning on the couch back in his home in the Rocky Mountain town, apparently physically unharmed. By the afternoon, he was seen playing happily with his siblings.

But Hopley, or whoever took the boy, was in the wind.

Allen said most sex offenders release their victims alive, especially when parents go public with pleas for them to be spared. Amber Alerts, he added, also raise the heat by calling the wider public's attention to the case.

The Mounties are not shedding much light on the sequence of events between Saturday's plea to the abductor and Kienan's reappearance in his apparently unguarded home on Sunday.

"We facilitated (Kienan's return), and we can't discuss the details at this time," Moskaluk said Monday in a Postmedia News report. "In the plea, there's mention of public places and suggestions of a safe place where he will be seen and so on and so forth."

Police suggested the abductor could leave Kienan at a gas station or parking lot.

Moskaluk said the Hebert house had been released from crime-scene status but the family was staying elsewhere, so it was vacant and apparently unguarded when the boy was returned. Someone called 911 around 3 a.m. to tip police he was there.

Moskaluk said the Mounties now will focus on finding Hopley, the alleged abductor.

But the caller to one open-line radio show in Vancouver on Monday found it incredible that with 60 officers investigating the case, no one could be spared to watch the vacant house. A commenter to the Post story seemed to suggest police turned a blind eye.

"As the community has only one road in or out, driving to the Hebert house would have required passing the search and rescue command post located at the entrance to the suburb, whose flat, largely treeless landscape offers little visual cover," Gardiner Westbound wrote.

But most people were just thankful Kienan was safe, and on a day that now symbolizes a horrible tragedy elsewhere - 9/11.

"How sad that we cannot just celebrate this small miracle . . . there is enough time for critique and conspiracy theories later," said myptofview.

(CP Photo)