On a gray morning last December in the woods behind Heywood Hospital, a line of men and women in blaze‑orange vests — some in their 20s, others pushing 70 — moved methodically through the underbrush.
A software engineer walked beside a pediatric trauma doctor as a retiree kept pace with a young EMT. GPS units hummed at their hips and a search dog — an Australian Shepherd named Roo — wove between tree trunks.
They aren’t police, or firefighters, or even paid specialists. They are members of Central Mass Search and Rescue — an all‑volunteer team serving New England, whose quiet, painstaking work would narrow the search for a missing Westminster man, Leonard Mercury, to a cold, dark lake a few hundred yards away…