Two years ago, a 10-year-old boy named Jesse Wilson went missing from Buckeye. On Tuesday, police announced that human remains found earlier this month are his.
In a press conference, Buckeye Police Chief Larry Hall called the discovery the “worst outcome we could possibly imagine.”
“Naturally, our community, the family, our police department and law enforcement partners wanted to find him alive, and so unfortunately today we have this announcement that is definitely impacting our community, impacting our officers, impacting the investigators,” he said.
When Jesse was reported missing in July 2016, he was originally considered a runway, because his adoptive mother said he’d slipped out his second-story bedroom window before. But before long, massive search parties were mobilized.
Hall thanked everyone in the community who helped look for Jesse, “because hundreds and hundreds of volunteers came out to help us search,” he said. “This is a community’s worst nightmare, as I said earlier in the investigation a year-and-a-half ago. It’s a police department’s worst nightmare.”
Hall said his department will continue to investigate.
Jesse’s biological siblings have since been removed from his adoptive mother’s care.
