By Rosie DiManno and Marco Chown Oved
They called and called: ELIJAH!
Hundreds of them, searching high and low, scanning homes and playgrounds, seeking especially those spots where a toddler may have been drawn: yards with swing sets out back, friendly refuges to a youngster’s eyes, the not-scary places.
They looked for tiny bootprints in the snow. But those were everywhere.
And Elijah Marsh was beyond hearing his rescuers by then.
That is the only mercy in a story with no happy ending – oblivion had descended. Elijah wasn’t cold any more or frightened.
It was David Elines who found the 3-year-old. On the ground behind a small wooden veranda, next to a garbage can and a parked car.
“He was there and he just looked peaceful,” Elines told the Star Friday. “I put my coat on him and yelled.”
Three hundred metres, in a straight line, from where the child had set out around 4:20 a.m. Thursday after pushing open the door of the foyer at his grandmother’s apartment building. Clad only in a diaper, a thin T-shirt and snow boots, outside in the dark and deep-freeze weather.
But Elijah hadn’t gone in a straight line.
The final images of the boy, captured by surveillance cameras, show him moving westward along a bendy section of Neptune Dr. He would have looped back, at some point, to wind up behind the house on Baycrest Ave. where his body, vital signs absent, was found at 10 a.m. Nearly six hours exposed to the bitter elements on one of the coldest nights in Toronto, with the wind chill plunging to -33 C.
Elines thought he knew cold. But this he can scarcely imagine.
For 17 months, Elines has been slogging the picket line at the suburban Crown can factory with 120 other workers who walked off the job over salary and pension freezes and what they claim were threats by management to bring on new hires paid almost half the current wages.
Early Thursday, the morning strike crew had gathered to “chirp,” as usual, at the scab replacement workers doing their jobs, says Steve McHugh, the Steelworkers’ Union leader on the line outside the factory near Highway 400 and Finch Ave. A sparse line, only seven strikers, but well bundled against the bitter wind.
“We’ve been at this a long time. We know how to dress for the weather,” said McHugh.
In the warm-up shed, after an hour of sidewalk-trudging, they heard on the radio about the missing Elijah. As they were only a few kilometres away, they called police at 32 Division and offered to help.
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