Minneapolis police officers and a K-9 unit spent three and a half hours searching for Bob Stewart, an 82 year old veteran who vanished during a walk on the city’s north side on May 14. A police drone found him in about nine minutes. Stewart was barefoot in Shingle Creek, soaked and holding onto a tree limb below a steep ravine in Webber Park. The department released the rescue footage this week, while the City Council weighs whether Minneapolis should run a drone program of its own.
A Thermal Camera Caught an Anomaly in the Trees
The drone crew found Stewart because thermal imaging picks out body heat where human eyes see only vegetation, and Officer Drew Clark noticed one warm shape in a densely wooded stretch of parkland that didn’t move like the deer his camera had flagged moments earlier. The drone worked its way across backyards and wooded ground before it swept the creek line. Clark wrote in his report that he spotted an anomaly through the trees.
That anomaly was Stewart, who had slipped in the mud along the creek and couldn’t climb out. His wife Linda described it plainly: “Once one foot went in the mud, you can’t get the other one out.” He spent about five hours down there, on and off, in the water.
The video shows what happened next. The drone held position overhead and guided officers and firefighters through the woods, and the responders waded the creek and climbed over fallen trees to reach him. Stewart went to the hospital, recovered, and weeks later met the officers who pulled him out.
Clark kept his own assessment modest. “I don’t know if we would have located him,” he said, noting a ground search of that terrain would eat up resources and hours the drone simply didn’t need…