Missing California boy found after 2-hour Pembroke search

PEMBROKE – Wardens and other rescuers searched roads and woods near Route 1 for about two hours Thursday morning after a 7-year-old California boy was reported missing.

C.J. Eakman later walked out of the woods apparently unharmed.

The boy had been playing with his cousin in the back yard of the home of his uncle, Ed Leighton, when the child disappeared. The Leightons live on Oxcove Road.

“The cousin came in and said that C.J. was missing,” Joey Gardner of the Maine Warden Service said Thursday.

The family searched the area around the back yard for about 45 minutes and then called the Maine Warden Service

“We started a hasty search, where we run up every road, trail, check all residences in the area, basically the quickest way to cover the most area,” Gardner said.

Warden officials called for a search by air, and planes from the Maine Warden Service and Maine State Police were en route.

A Maine Warden Service dog, along with the Maine State Police and a state police dog and the Calais Police Department dog, searched the woods surrounding the Leighton house.