Lorraine Campbell is searching for a hero.
She thinks he lived on Lynn Valley Road and had dark hair. She doesn’t know his name.
But she believes he saved her son’s life.
It was a seemingly average day 38 years ago when Lorraine experienced every parent’s worst nightmare.
After working in the kitchen she went to check on her two sons, Erick and David. David was nowhere to be found.
He was three-and-a-half years old, just about the time kids learn how to turn knobs to open doors. His bedroom was in the back of the family’s split-level home on Ramsay Road in North Vancouver. The room was near the back door and Lorraine immediately feared her young son might have gotten out.
She hurriedly searched every room in the house before running outside to check the front and back yards and nearby yards. She even asked a neighbour across the street if her dog might be able to track David’s scent.
At the back of her mind, she also considered the possibility that David had been kidnapped but was too busy frantically searching the neighbourhood to dwell on such a terrible scenario.
“I was in shock and fear and anger,” says Lorraine. “I looked everywhere.”
She searched the vacant, overgrown lot across the street, and ran up to nearby Upper Lynn elementary because there was a playground there. Maybe he just wanted to play.
But there was no sign of her son. There would also be no sound from him. David was born profoundly deaf. He was just learning sign language at the time and could not talk or write.
He couldn’t tell anyone if he was lost or scared, if he was hurt or in danger.
Lorraine looked for her son for almost an hour, an eternity for a parent.
When her search didn’t turn up any clues, Lorraine called the police. They kept her on the phone for a long time, she says, and they asked lots of questions.
“When I finally got off the phone I guess I was running back up the driveway when this car came very slowly around the corner on Ramsay Road and I could see my son sort of standing up in the seat,” she recalls.
The man noticed Lorraine running up the driveway and stopped his car, correctly assuming that the worried-looking person on the side of the road might know something about the child in his passenger-side seat.
The man handed David over to his very relieved mom and explained he was an off-duty fireman who had been working in his garden when he noticed the toddler running down the centre of Lynn Valley Road with a bus right behind him blowing its horn loudly.
David paid no attention to the bus, he just kept running. He didn’t hear the horn.
“So the fireman scooped him up and got him out of the road,” explains Lorraine.
After pulling him from the road, the man tried talking to David but there was no response. He then noticed the boy chewing on a plastic disc hanging around his neck. The disc had three words: “deaf” and “Ramsay Road.”
It was an ID tag Lorraine had bought at a pet store and engraved with David’s address in case he ever got lost. The rest of the address and information, however, had been chewed off.
(Curiously, David refused to wear the ID tag after the incident and Lorraine thinks he associated it with being lost. She later got him an ID he could wear on his shoe.)
The fireman told Lorraine he put David in his car and drove to Ramsay Road hoping the boy could point out his house.
Lorraine says she was overwhelmed with emotion when her son was returned and didn’t spend much time talking to the man who found him.
“I wish I had spoken more with the fireman and found out his name,” she says.
She remembers he had dark hair, but that’s it. “I don’t remember much else because it was a traumatic experience.”
“I was extremely upset, and shaking with fear and I never did thank that fireman properly,” says Lorraine. “I have always regretted that. My apologies to you and a very sincere, long overdue thank you dear Mr. Fireman wherever you are.”
David grew up in the house on Ramsay Road and now lives in Ontario where he works in web design. He is a father and has a new baby.
“Life with him has always been interesting and an adventure,” says Lorraine of her son.
Although neither of her sons remember the day David went missing Lorraine will never forget. She can still remember “very vividly” the car turning the corner and seeing her son standing up in the front seat.
“I regret not spending more time with (the fireman) that day and thanking him profusely for rescuing (David) and bringing him home,” says Lorraine.
“I know that this is the duty of firemen, they rescue people, but he was on his day off and I just think there’s a special place in heaven waiting for him.”
Rosalind Duane can be reached via email at [email protected].
