Thirty seconds. That’s all it took for Jacob Bates to disappear.
Bates, 25, who has autism, was riding mountain bike trails at River Legacy Park in Arlington one evening last week with his father, Scot, when the two became separated in the dense Trinity River bottomland.
“And he just took his eyes off of him for 30 seconds,” Tim Gundlach, Bates’ uncle, told WFAA.
When Scot looked back, Jacob was gone, swallowed by 1,300 acres of hardwood forest, wetlands, and winding trail.
Arlington police deployed ATVs, a helicopter, and drones as darkness and near-freezing temperatures settled in. Hours passed. Nothing.
“We searched everywhere,” said Gundlach, in another report by a local NBC affiliate. “The park is so vast… there’s heavy brush, steep cliffs, all kinds of terrain. Where he was at, there was no way that my brother and I would have found him without help.”
What cracked the search open wasn’t a department asset or another government apparatus. Per WFAA, Arlington resident David Dedwylder saw the Arlington Police Facebook post and started making calls in the middle of the night, looking specifically for someone with a thermal-imaging drone. He found Chance Sauser, a drone operator out of Anna, up in Collin County, and woke him up.
Sauser drove more than an hour to Arlington and launched his drone into the dark. The thermal camera found Jacob shivering alone in a far western corner of the park. Then came his uncle, Tim Gundlach, a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and a pair of bolt cutters from the truck.
“We followed the drone,” Gundlach said afterward. “He put us right over. We were yelling. And then when he yelled back, we knew he was gonna be OK.”
It was 5:30 in the morning. Jacob had been out there nearly 12 hours. He was taken to a local hospital and treated for hypothermia. According to the NBCDFW report, his body temperature had dropped to 91 degrees.
“We want to thank them and recognize them,” said a thankful Gundlach. “We want other people to be encouraged that there are some good people out there still.”