Video Shows 4-Year-Old Boy Wandering Toward Water Before Death: Report

BOSTON, MA — A report published in the Boston Globe reveals more details in the disappearance of 4-year-old Mohamed Abou Fofana, whose body was found on Spectacle Island Monday afternoon after he went missing from the Castle Island area of South Boston Sunday night.

Massachusetts State Police spokesman David Procopio told reporters that surveillance footage showed the boy leaving a playground by himself and walking east toward the water at the tip of Castle Island, according to the Globe.

Fofana had last been seen Sunday evening between 7 and 8 p.m. when his grandfather said he wandered off from a trip to the beach with his grandfather and older sister.

According to the Boston Globe, authorities first found a blue Croc shoe—the type Fofana had been wearing—in the water. Just before 12:30 p.m., after the tide had gone out, his body was found on Spectacle Island, the nearest of Boston’s Harbor Islands due east of the South Boston peninsula.

Procopio said Fofana will be taken back to the mainland so the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner can determine his cause of death, according to the Globe. The Massachusetts State Police’s Suffolk County unit is continuing its investigation.

Fofana's great uncle Musa Fofana told the Globe that the family came from several countries in West Africa. The boy's mother, Matenjay Fofana, came from the Ivory Coast, and others moved from Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, he said.

Speaking to the outlet, Matenjay Fofana said through a family member interpreting that though he had difficulties speaking due to an autism diagnosis, her son "sang a lot, a lot."

“He was just a sweet kid," she added.

Read the full report in the Boston Globe.