Missing Cary Man Found Saturday Night

“WE FOUND KYLE. WE FOUND KYLE!!!!!!! We found him!”

That’s the message Kyle Cuchna’s family posted on their Find Kyle Facebook page just before midnight, when the missing 21-year-old man from Cary was found.

He was found by another local family who joined the massive volunteer search effort Saturday. More than 100 volunteers, including a psychic and a search dog, gathered Saturday at Veterans Acres Park to spread out and search for the young man.

He was found late Saturday, Jan. 17, at a shelter in Wauconda. A photo of the family that found Kyle was posted to the Find Kyle Facebook page late Saturday.

“Kyle means a lot to us now! We feel he is,like a member of our family,” wrote Tina Leigh, 39, of Wauconda, on the page. “Please keep in touch with us!!! HJe is one amazing young man! And I am grateful to have met him and call him my friend!!”

Leigh is a school bus driver and a mother of five.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, if that was my son,’ “ Leigh told the Chicago Tribune on Sunday. “My heart was so into it ... we just had to find him.”

After a day of handing out fliers, she took her son Jonathan and her boyfriend to the shelter run by Messiah Lutheran Church in Wauconda. While explaining who she was looking for, a shelter worker recognized his name and pointed out him out among the men spending the night.

Cuchna, who is bipolar and not taking his medication was deemed a “high risk” missing person after disappearing from church on Jan. 10. He’d been living with his sister in Cary when he was taken to Advocate Good Shepherd Hospital on Jan. 10. But he checked himself out of the hospital and went to Cary United Methodist Church, and that was the last place he was seen.

The grateful Cuchna family said the successful search was a community effort aided by the power of social media: ”This is amazing - thank you everyone this is such a group /family /community effort.”

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