Boy Missing Since Christmas Eve Found Dead in Pond

An autistic 4-year-old boy who went missing on Christmas Eve was found dead yesterday in a South Carolina pond. Jayden Morrison disappeared while his family was visiting his grandmother in Little River. His mother went shopping and left her three children at the house, and minutes later, around 5:30pm, his grandmother noticed the door ajar. The search began immediately. "We've always been in a gated situation," the boy's father, told reporters on Christmas Day. "We knew he was a wanderer when he was younger, but he was always in an enclosement. We never put him in a position to go out and freely wander." Investigators believe the non-communicative boy wandered into the water shortly after he was reported missing, NBC News reports; an autopsy shows that he drowned. (More missing boy stories.)