A woman in eastern Ontario is breathing a sigh of relief this week after police found her son hiding in an abandoned building 16 days after he vanished in the night.
But Jenny Tozer’s agonizing wait to be reunited with her son Logan now has her joining the call for a new type of phone alert — one that would flag vulnerable people who have gone missing to residents living in that region.
Had that option been in place, Tozer says, Logan probably would have been returned much sooner to their farm on the outskirts of Havelock, Ont., a small community about 40 kilometres east of Peterborough.
“I wouldn’t have [had] to worry,” the mother of nine homeschooled children said of the past two weeks.
Known to wander
This wasn’t the first time Logan went off by himself.
The 18-year-old is into adventure books like the Hardy Boys and enjoys exploring empty buildings and woods where he finds rocks, animal skulls and other trinkets, Tozer said.
He usually comes back after a day or so, which is what made his recent disappearance from Oct. 13 to Oct. 30 so scary, she said.
After saying good night and going to sleep on Oct. 13, Logan wasn’t in his bed the next morning, leaving his siblings “freaking out.”
Tozer called Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) on Oct. 15, triggering a series of efforts including ground searches, drones, helicopter flyovers, news releases, posters and social media messaging.
“I’m falling apart,” Tozer told CBC on Tuesday afternoon, before her son’s return. “It’s been too long now.”
The next morning, everybody was “super relieved” when Logan was found by OPP officers in a building near the centre of Havelock, said OPP spokesperson Brooklyn Harker. The disappearance was never deemed suspicious, Harker said.
Officers had searched that building regularly, as it was identified as one of Logan’s regular hangouts.
Logan told CBC he didn’t come out from the closet “because I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘This is the police.'”
“Then the one guy unburied me from the coats I was under,” Logan said from the hospital where he was taken Wednesday to be assessed, his mother by his side.
Bundled in multiple layers, Logan slept mostly in the woods and survived on apples, peanut butter and crackers taken from a food bank bin, he said.
Asked if he’d escape like this again, Logan said “probably not.”
“We’re hoping not,” Tozer was quick to add.
‘He’s not really 18 years old’
Logan has high-functioning autism.
He avoids people and might be triggered to leave by the simplest of things, whether it’s something he reads in a book or the fall colours, Tozer said.
He doesn’t process emotions in a typical way, his mother added, pointing to one night last month when he disappeared and she found him reading in one of their trailers.
“I didn’t want to wake anyone up,” she recalls him saying when asked why he slipped off.
Tozer said she became aware after Logan’s most recent disappearance of Bill 74, a private member’s bill in the Ontario legislature that is calling for a new type of phone alert.
Not bound by the more strict criteria of an Amber alert, the proposed message would notify people in a specific region that a vulnerable person like Logan, or maybe a senior with dementia, has gone missing.
“Not just me, but a lot of parents that deal with autistic kids or anyone with a disability could benefit from it,” Tozer said.
As both NDP MPP Monique Taylor, who introduced the bill in 2023, and the Ontario Autism Coalition have pointed out, some in Havelock were unaware of Logan’s disappearance despite the town’s small population.
“It can be very frustrating for us to sort of relay the urgency here,” said Kate Dudley-Logue, the coalition’s vice-president of community outreach, about cases like Logan’s.
“It’s hard not to think …’Well, he’s 18 years old and he’s basically a young adult now and he should be fine,'” she said. “But … he’s not functioning as an 18-year-old.”
A phone alert would reach people who are not online and who avoid social media, Dudley-Logue added.
‘Stalled with no action’
Bill 74 remains at the committee stage, to the frustration of Taylor.
At Queen’s Park on Wednesday, soon after Logan was found, she said the bill was “stalled with no action.”
Government House Leader Steve Clark said that in his own experience with private members bills, he’s rolled up his sleeves and asked “how we can work together.”
“You can make those same decisions,” he said in his response to Taylor.
Dudley-Logue of the coalition said that with Taylor announcing a plan to run in the next federal election and the spectre of a looming provincial election, she’s worried Bill 74 will just die.
“There really is no excuse for the government to be sitting on this,” she said.
Ottawa Morning8:39Should there be an Amber Alert for missing people with disabilities?
An 18-year-old man found, but not before his mother spent two weeks frantically searching for him. Logan Tozer has autism, and disability advocates say his case reveals a gap in our missing persons protocol.