Tampa Reporter Finds Missing Boy

Sometimes you go and cover the news and other times the news comes to you.

WFTS Reporter Cameron Polom was covering the story of a missing 10-year-old Florida boy, when the reporter got a big break on the story. 

He missing boy he was reporting on happened to be standing right next to him. 

ABC News reports that Paul Ezekiel Fagan, who has a mild learning disability, was last seen around 4 p.m. Thursday playing in the front yard of his house.

Polom says Paul lives with his grandmother, Hazel Epps, who has custody from his biological mother.

Polom was walking through the family’s neighborhood at dawn in the minutes following a media press conference on the boy's disappearance when he saw a child fitting Paul’s description behind a neighbor’s fence.

"I thought to myself oh this couldn’t be the boy, no way, and I walked over and said, 'Hey bud what’s your name?' He mumbled Paul and then I asked if I could pick him up over the fence and he gave me a huge hug before we walked over to the officers parked in front of his house," Polom said.

Polom says Paul told him he had spent the rainy night in his neighbor’s backyard that's riddled with overgrown vegetation, which made him hard to spot by previous search efforts. Paul told Polom he spent part of the night taking a cat nap in the shrubbery.

The reunion with the boy's family was caught on camera.

Let's go to the video: