Children missing 10 hours before search started

By :TERRY SMITH

An official search didn't start for an 11-year-old girl who died from hypothermia until some 10 hours after she was told by her father on Christmas Day to walk nine miles through snowy and frigid conditions to her mother's home in the west Magic Reservoir area.

The Blaine County Sheriff's Office reported Monday afternoon that authorities weren't notified that Sage Aragon and her 12-year-old brother Bear Aragon were missing until 7 p.m. that day. Lincoln County authorities reported earlier that the children started walking toward their mother's home at around 9 a.m. after their father's vehicle became stuck in snow on West Magic Road about a mile west of its intersection with state Highway 75. The area is south of Timmerman Hill where Blaine, Lincoln and Camas counties meet.

Sage Aragon, was pronounced dead at 4:15 a.m. on Dec. 26 at St. Luke's Wood River Medical Center south of Ketchum. She was found by Blaine County Search and Rescue personnel around 2 a.m. about 2.7 miles west of where her father's vehicle became stuck. The girl's father, Robert E. Aragon, a 55-year-old Jerome man, was arrested Friday evening and faces charges in Lincoln County of second-degree murder and felony injury to a child.

The sheriff's office reported that Bear Aragon was found about 4.5 miles "from where he was dropped off" in a Bureau of Land Management restroom at about 9:50 p.m. on Dec. 25. Bear Aragon was also taken to St. Luke's where he was treated and released.

According to the sheriff's office, the girl was found with the assistance of search dogs next to a barb wire fence on the south side of West Magic Road.

"She was mostly covered with windblown snow and was barely visible," the sheriff's office reported in a press release. "She was still wearing her brown down coat, black shirt, pink pajama pants and tan snow boots. Sage was unconscious and hypothermic."

The sheriff's offfice further reported that Robert Aragon, with the assistance of his cousin, Kenneth S. Quintana, a 55-year-old Jerome man, was able to get the vehicle, a 1988 Buick Century, unstuck sometime between 10:30 and 11 a.m. on Christmas Day. He then drove to Shoshone. He was notified by the children's mother, 32-year-old Joletta M. Jenks, sometime between 1-2 p.m. that day that the children had not arrived at her home.

"He and Quintana drove back to where they dropped the children off and headed in on foot to look for the children," the sheriff's office reported.

According to the sheriff's office, temperatures in the area at the time the girl was missing ranged from 27 degrees above zero to minus 5 degrees.