A 12-year-old boy missing from his home in unincorporated Zion was found safe Monday evening after Lake County Sheriff's K9 Loki picked up his scent from a shoe and led deputies straight to a thick bush where the child was hiding. The boy had been missing for more than four hours before the dog located him, and he was reunited with his family.
Deputies were dispatched around 6:30 p.m. Monday to the 42300 block of North Kilbourne Road in unincorporated Zion following a 911 report of the missing child, according to Pulse Radio 96.1. As CBS News reports, Lake County Sheriff's Office deputies first searched the boy's home and the surrounding area, deploying a drone before K9 teams moved in to search the brush. Deputy Kevin Lowe and K9 Loki joined the search in a heavily wooded area, using a scent sample from the missing child's shoe to begin the track.
According to the same report, Loki darted toward a large bush near the house and alerted deputies to the boy hidden underneath it, barking once he found him. Deputy Lowe said the search mobilized every available resource to locate the child safely, but credited the dog directly for the outcome. “Loki did all the work to locate the child,” Lowe said, adding that he considers himself lucky to be part of the Lake County K9 unit.
A Dog's Nose Where Drones Fall Short
Deputy Lowe emphasized that no amount of modern technology can replicate what a working dog's nose can do in dense brush, the outlet's report notes. K9 teams help deputies cover terrain that would otherwise be difficult and slow to search on foot, especially in the wooded, semi-rural pockets that make up much of unincorporated Lake County.
Monday's find echoes a similar rescue from March 7, 2024, when K9 Loki and Deputy Lowe tracked and located an injured, missing woman near a neighbor's garage in unincorporated Lake Villa after she had fled a residence with severe cuts, according to Arlington Cardinal. That woman received emergency medical treatment and evaluation following the track. Lake County's K9 unit has also made headlines this year for other tracking work, including a July pursuit in which K9 Simba followed a burglary suspect 1.5 miles into a forest preserve in unincorporated Libertyville.
Why Unincorporated Zion Relies on the County
Unincorporated Zion consists of residential pockets in northern Lake County near the Illinois-Wisconsin border, where the Lake County Sheriff's Office serves as the primary law enforcement agency for areas outside city limits, per Journal & Topics. Interspersed unincorporated pockets like this one depend directly on the sheriff's office for patrol and specialized search-and-rescue assets rather than municipal police departments, since Lake County's map is dotted with such areas outside any city's boundaries.
That reliance extends well beyond Zion. During 2023, the Lake County Sheriff's K9 Unit responded to more than 170 requests for canine assistance from municipal police departments across the county that do not maintain their own full-service canine units, according to the sheriff's office. That year, the unit recorded 497 total deployments, with 64 percent originating from sheriff's calls and 36 percent assisting municipal departments, resulting in 72 missing, endangered, or fleeing people being located, per the Lake County Sheriff's Office's public accounting reported by Shaw Local. Those deployments also yielded eight firearms and significant narcotics seizures. County leaders formally praised the unit's work when the Lake County Board issued a Special Recognition for the canine unit on January 16, 2024.
CBS News reports that Lake County had 10 K9 teams in 2025, and those teams were deployed 485 times that year, helping find 35 people and contributing to 90 arrests. The teams logged nearly 2,500 hours of training in 2025, according to the same report — figures that underscore just how central Deputy Lowe and K9 Loki's work is to one of ten such teams covering the county.
More Than Search and Rescue
Beyond emergency calls, the unit conducted 48 public canine demonstrations across Lake County in 2023 to engage the community.
For now, the outcome in unincorporated Zion is the headline: a boy missing for hours from his home, found safe beneath a bush because a dog followed the scent from his shoe.
