By Jeff Libby | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted June 10, 2005
HOLLY HILL -- On a Saturday afternoon in April, storeowners across from a Riverside Drive park saw two boys sitting on the grass with bedrolls and fishing poles, chowing down on junk food.
Two weeks later, the same two boys were thought to have been spotted outside a nearby grocery store on LPGA Boulevard, police say.
But despite the apparent sightings, for four months now, Bryan Hayes, 13, of Port Orange and Mark Degner, 12, of Jacksonville have remained missing.
Holly Hill police renewed a call for help locating the youths on Thursday at the request of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. The boys are considered endangered runaways, police said.
Jacksonville police have been searching for the boys since Feb. 10 when they walked off a Jacksonville middle school campus after an altercation with a teacher. The boys had no money and no extra clothes.
"We're pretty well just crying out," said Detective Hal Lloyd of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. "If they're out and about, if they're stealing lunch meat from a store, I just want their faces out there so somebody might recognize them. I don't want interest in them to die."
Jacksonville police are offering an $8,000 reward for information leading to the safe return of the boys.
Investigators say they are "very confident" that at least the first Holly Hill sighting was Mark and Bryan.
Of the more than 800,000 children younger than 18 reported missing each year, 94 percent are located and returned home, said Gary Gardiner, a senior case manager for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
"We never give up of, course," Gardiner said. "Somebody's going to see them out in that community."
The national center has put up posters of the two boys in Wal-Marts throughout the Southeast and has targeted hotels, motels, gas stations and convenience stores in Daytona Beach, Holly Hill, Jacksonville and Panama City, Gardiner said.
Both boys are considered "developmentally delayed" by the Jacksonville school system, police said. Bryan also takes medication for a kidney ailment and high blood pressure, said his grandmother, Alene Hayes of Port Orange.
"We're very concerned," Hayes said by phone Thursday. "We haven't heard a thing. But we're still hopeful."
Bryan had been living at a group home in Jacksonville since October, Hayes said, and was finally getting treatment she had sought for him for years.
"He was as happy and doing as well as I had ever seen," Hayes said.
Bryan also called home regularly, Hayes said. When she visited him he seemed to be thrilled with his new friends at the group home.
But on Feb. 10, after Mark argued with a teacher, Bryan ran to him, and the two boys left the campus, Hayes said.
After a newspaper ad featured the two boys in April, law-enforcement officials received a few calls of sightings in the Holly Hill area. Holly Hill police searched the parks and placed posters in businesses. But no tips have been called in since mid-April, Lloyd said.
"No one has seen them," said Gina Baker, an investigator for Holly Hill police. "But I don't know if it's really known that these children are missing. That's why we're asking for the media's help."
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