CASS COUNTY, Mo. – A grandmother is distraught after losing her grandson, who drowned in their neighbor’s pond Tuesday. Five-year-old Gene Ferguson was missing for seven hours before he was found.
Cass County sheriff’s deputies, state police, family and friends scoured the rural area for the boy until the tragic discovery was made by divers, who found his body underwater. The pond Gene was found in is only steps away from his house.
“There shouldn’t be that kind of water in the front door of a house of a child with Autism, because Autism children like water,” said Margie Ferguson, Gene’s grandmother.
The pond has bothered her ever since it was built by the neighbors two years ago.
“We have padlocks on all our doors to protect Gene so he can’t get out, because he runs,” Margie explained. “He could be gone in 5 minutes. He could run 90 to nothing.”
That’s what she said happened on Tuesday morning.
“He was in the back yard riding his pony. His sister got sleepy and she went and laid down in her bed. I went in to check on her, and I looked out to see Gene and I didn’t see him,” Margie said.
She said when she saw the family dog, who was always tagging along with Gene, she knew something was wrong and called the sheriff’s office. The search began in the cornfields and barns where Gene loved to play.
“When they were hollering for him to tell him that Mama had purple Kool-Aid, so if he was scared he would come out,” she said.
After keeping hope until the evening, it was Sheriff Dwight Diehl who delivered the tragic news.
“I knew by the look on his face, and he said something and I don’t even know what it was because I jumped up and went screaming down through there, because I wanted to get my hands on Bill Cook,” she said. “He put that pond in and he was supposed to put a fence around it, or put a fence around our yard, and he hadn’t ever done it.”
FOX 4 went looking for Bill Cook, who owns the property next door, to ask him about the pond and promise of a fence. But he wasn’t there and one of his workers said they didn’t know when he would be back.
“I kept saying we have a special needs child and here’s all that water right near our front door. Nobody ever did anything about it, and so we just put up a brand new fence in the back yard for Gene and Cheyane because we were so worried about that pond.”
Gene’s body is still at the medical examiners’ office and family has not been able to see him. Margie is still in shock that her grandson is gone.
“It was the worst day of my life, it was absolutely unbelievable,” she said. “The day before this happened, that night he kept saying, ‘I’m going home, I’m going home,’ and we couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. But he kept saying it like it was a premonition or something for him.”
Gene and his sister were adopted by the Fergusons after they were taken from their parents. They say, because of their advanced age, social services wanted to place the children in foster care.
“So we had fit for three years fighting social workers and family service to get him to get him and to lose him in a second,” she lamented.
A second was all it took for Gene to wander away.
“He was the greatest little boy. I remember the first day that he called me mama, and he called my husband papa,” she said. “Last night I tried to close my eyes and I kept hearing him say, ‘Papa, let’s go play.’ I kept hearing that and I could hear his voice.”
Papa, as we spoke to Margie, sat alone in the back yard where he used to play with his grandson, too distraught to talk.
Despite having autism, Margie said Gene had a bright future. He was in a daycare where he excelled, and his teacher recently told the Fergusons he was ready to move on to Kindergarten. Gene’s goal in life was to be a firefighter.
“I just can’t imagine never seeing him again. I can’t imagine not seeing him grow up,” Margie said.