Two Ohio siblings who went missing last October were located in a remote Icelandic village earlier this month, thousands of kilometres away from home.
According to the U.S. Marshals Service, a family member reported the children, eight and nine years old, missing to the Canton Police Department on Oct. 25, 2024.
Authorities didn’t identify the gender of the children.
A police investigation revealed the 34-year-old mother “stopped taking her mental health medication, abandoned her apartment, and the children stopped attending school,” the U.S. Marshals Service said in a news release on Jan. 16.
Canton police eventually requested help from the U.S. Marshals Missing Child Unit in Cleveland to assist the investigation.
Authorities said the missing kids were initially tracked to Denver before detectives found out the mother and her two children travelled to London, England. From there, they moved to the Island of Jersey in the English Channel.
The trio then travelled to a remote fishing village in Iceland before being found by Icelandic police in a Reykjavik hotel.
“The children were placed in the care of Iceland social services until a trusted family member could get them,” U.S. Marshals said. “The mother was placed in a hospital where she will remain until she is well enough to travel back to the U.S.”
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The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, based in Alexandria, Va., helped fund the children’s return home.
“The collaboration of effort in this case can’t be overstated,” U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott said in the statement. “The ability to respond and recover these children abroad is an extremely difficult task. Our investigators did an outstanding job. We are lucky to have such strong and dedicated law enforcement partners and credit should be given to them for helping bring these children home.”