TOndrea (not her real name) is 15 years old, she loves boats. She always has one in her hand, white and blue in color. «She IS a friend of mine», she repeats. Andrea is a special little boy.
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It’s an afternoon at the end of June when the Imola police receive a report from the operations center in Bologna: Andrea is lost and doesn’t know how to get back.
Andrea was with his father, like many other times. She had also accompanied him to that shop, in the center of Bologna. She knew him well, it wasn’t the first time. That morning, however, something snapped in Andrea and he walked away from his father just when he stopped in the bathroom…
Search after search, then the Bologna operations center implements the protocol for missing persons. Andrea, fortunately, has a phone with him. And a cell connects to the Imola bus station, between viale Andrea Costa and via Aspromonte. “The cell has a radius of one kilometer – they explain from the Imola police station -. We immediately went out to look for him, on foot and with the patrol car, imagining that he could have arrived here by bus. In the meantime, the Bologna headquarters continued to provide us with the position hooked up by the phone”.
The searches continued unabated for hours. From Bologna, meanwhile, they let it be known that Andrea, in the past, went with his parents to the Chinese shop in Viale Marconi. But when the police arrives on site, it finds the shutters lowered: «At that point we started sifting through the images from the surveillance cameras. We had the description of the boy, how he was dressed, what he had with him. At that moment we realized that the beam locked from the cell reached all the way to the train station. So we went to search it, first outside and then inside.”
And Andrea was there, sitting on a bench, on platform two, the blue and white boat held tightly to him: «It’s my friend» he repeated to the police men who approached him with tact and delicacy: «He had arrived by train – they say -. He wanted to go to Rimini, he had been there with his father and mother and he remembered it.”
Andrea trusts the policemen who, “with due caution and indulging in his every desire”, accompany him out of the station and make him get into the police car.
It was almost 9 pm when, after nine hours of searching, the police station called 118 “so that the paramedics came to visit Andrea” and, immediately after, the boy’s mother, “who burst into tears of relief. When we put them on speakerphone, Andrea recognized her and started laughing. And he wanted to drink (three bottles of water) and ate a sandwich with cheese and ham. We were with him the whole time”, until his parents – about two hours later – “they don’t have a driving license, a relative accompanied them” – came to pick him up.
Andrea got lost, but has now returned home.
