Tom Sinclair's Story

Tom Sinclair was six years old when he wandered away from his family’s campsite on the shore of Lake Superior. He walked for hours along the rocky shoreline, eventually falling asleep with a piece of driftwood as a pillow. At dawn, he started walking again. “I turned around, and there was the man who became my unsung hero,” Sinclair recalls. The man, a fellow camper, was standing on top of a rock. He came over and said, “Tom, how would you like to see your mom?” Sinclair said yes. The man took him by the hand and led him back the other way. By then, Sinclair was exhausted—the man estimated he had walked at least three miles. So he picked the boy up on his shoulders and carried him back, talking to him the whole way. “I didn’t know how terrified and exhausted I was until I was on his shoulders and realized I was safe,” Sinclair says. When they reached the campsite, the man placed Sinclair in his mother’s arms. She was crying hysterically. Sinclair never saw him again.

The search that missed him