Despite prayers, searches and an active investigation, La Vista authorities know no more about Ryan Larsen’s whereabouts than they did when he disappeared a year ago.
omaha.com
A year after La Vista boy's disappearance, mother holds onto hope her son is alive
Super sweet. Super helpful. A big imagination. A bigger heart.
That is how Tammi Larsen describes her youngest child and only son. Ryan was the last of her four children still at home. Her youngest daughter had just graduated from high school and moved to a community two hours away. Her two older daughters also were grown and starting their own families. His father had never been part of his life.
Tammi Larsen said Ryan was always looking for ways to help. For example, if the carts were a mess in a grocery store parking lot, he would arrange them and put them together.
Ryan’s reward for doing well at school? Being allowed to help the janitor.
“He would get to help the janitor do different projects,” his mother said. “Take out the trash, go help in the lunchroom, picking up stuff. That was the reward he chose — to help the janitor.”
He was creative and liked building things with Legos, cardboard and tape, Larsen said.
“He is the kindest little boy,” said Christy Latham, the oldest of Ryan’s three sisters.
Ryan’s autism affected the way he communicated and interacted with others. It made him prone to anxiety and, when stressed — as his mother believes he was on the day he disappeared — he coped by walking away. He also has Tourette syndrome — a condition of the nervous system — and epilepsy, so he was on a range of medications.
His sister, Taylor Larsen, wrote on Facebook soon after her brother’s disappearance that his autism made him who he is.
“At first he is shy, but once you get to know him, he won’t stop talking. The media is saying he suffers from autism, but I think that is what makes him who he is,” she wrote. “I envy him for being able to ignore what other people think ... He is ambitious and has overcome great things ... Ryan is deeply loved by our family and friends.”
Tammi Larsen is convinced her son is alive and she sees hope in the fact that her son hasn’t been found.
“I tell the girls every day that: ‘Every day we don’t get that phone call is one more chance we have of getting him back.’ I still believe he’s out there somewhere. We just have to find him.”
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“He was actually very happy,” Tammi Larsen said. “One of the things we’d been working on was him getting dressed by himself, and it was a pretty successful morning. I dropped him off (at school) and everything seemed to be OK.”
It was a Monday. The Omaha area was in the midst of a wet spell, so Larsen grabbed an umbrella for Ryan as they left their apartment.
The umbrella later would be the only physical evidence that appears to place Ryan back at the family’s apartment building after he left his grade school.
A sixth grader, Ryan attended La Vista West Elementary School, the same school his mother had attended as a little girl. The school was about a five-minute walk from the apartment where he and his mother lived, and about a 10-minute walk from his grandmother’s home.
Officials with the Papillion La Vista Community Schools have declined to talk about what happened because of a possible lawsuit by the Larsen family.
Tammi Larsen provided the following account of what she said she has been told about that day at school:
Ryan had been struggling with a math problem that morning and had gotten frustrated to the point that he needed to be alone to settle down.
In accordance with the individual educational program his mother and the school had agreed to, Ryan went to a separate room to be by himself but under the supervision of an adult. That adult stayed with him until needing to leave. The adult’s replacement was late, and it was during this unsupervised time that Ryan left.
Ryan’s mother said she has been told he was discovered missing from that room between 11:45 a.m. and 11:55 a.m.
Lausten said police records indicate Ryan last was seen between 11:55 a.m. and 12:05 p.m. as he walked past the elementary school office with his umbrella. As he did so, the school secretary called out to Ryan to say that she would hold his umbrella for him, Lausten said. But Ryan kept walking, he said.
According to the time stamp on Larsen’s voice mail, she said she was notified by the school at 12:27 p.m. that her son was missing.
According to Lausten, the school called 911 to report him missing at about 12:29 p.m. and police arrived there at 12:32 p.m.
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