The body of a 10-year-old boy who went missing from a special needs school in Japan was found on Wednesday submerged in a waterfall about 1.5km away.
The boy, who had a mild intellectual disability, left his classroom at the Ishikawa Prefectural Komatsu Special Needs School at around 11am local time on Tuesday.
School officials said he asked to use the bathroom but did not come back.
Teachers searched the school buildings and grounds before notifying police and his family.
School officials told reporters they believed the boy unlocked an emergency exit at the rear of the building and left the premises. One entrance to the building had been found unlocked, according to Asahi Shimbun.
The boy’s outdoor shoes were found at the school while his indoor shoes were discovered at the edge of a nearby rice field, suggesting he had walked out of the building in his indoor shoes.
Security camera footage from a road near the school showed a child matching the missing boy’s description and clothing running towards Junigataki Falls shortly after 11am on Tuesday.
Some 200 firefighters and police officers searched through Tuesday before resuming at 5am on Wednesday. A police dog detected a human scent near the waterfall.
At around 11am on Wednesday, about 24 hours after he had left the classroom, a firefighter found the boy submerged in the water at the base of Junigataki Falls.
He was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead. There were no visible external injuries and his death was not thought to be suspicious.
Local residents had raised concern during the search about the risk of bear attacks in the area, with a sighting reported the same day, Hokkoku Shimbun reported.
A helicopter and a drone were deployed to assist the search.
The case has drawn attention to the risks faced by children with intellectual disabilities who wander away from supervised settings.
About half of children and young people with autism are reported by their parents to wander and of those, one in four go missing long enough to cause concern, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The most common dangers in such cases are drowning and traffic injury. The risk isn’t limited to autism, however, as children with intellectual disabilities more broadly face similar challenges in understanding safety and communicating with others when they leave familiar environments.
