In late July, heavy summer rains drenched central Connecticut. While that’s usually a welcome relief from the heat, the wet weather hindered Vernon police officers’ search for an 8-year-old boy with autism whose family said was nonverbal and who had gone missing from his apartment early that morning. As law enforcement headed into the wooded area adjacent to the apartment complex, they began hearing occasional cries.

Tracking the sound, officers made their way toward the boy’s location. However, dense vegetation made it rough going, and the rain turned the ground into a sloppy, muddy knee-deep quagmire.

“We tried crossing, but we kept getting stuck. I continued army crawling through the mud. It got drier 20 feet from there. That’s where we located the juvenile,” Officer Dominic Marandino told the local NBC news station.

Reaching the missing child was only part one of the job. Transporting him, and themselves, to drier land presented its own challenges. The mud prevented the boy, who was nude, from walking on his own. Officers began constructing a makeshift bridge out of nearby branches to cover the muddy traps, while also setting up a system of handing off the child from one person to another until he was firmly on safe ground.

Marandino told reporters the child was cold and distraught. They didn’t know how long he’d been out in the elements, but he was returned to his family uninjured.