BERNE — A fruitless search on Sunday turned into a rescue on Monday when the Albany County Sheriff’s Office and other first responder organizations retrieved an elderly Pennsylvania man from heavy brush in Berne. 

The man, 82-year-old Wesley L. Knapp, had been traveling from New York to Pennsylvania when he phoned his wife on Sunday to let her know that his SUV got stuck in the mud, with cell phone data suggesting he was in the Stage Road of Berne area when he made the call, Sheriff Craig Apple wrote in a Facebook post announcing the man’s disappearance. 

Mary Alice Molgard, of the East Berne Volunteer Fire Company, told The Enterprise on Monday, before the man was found, that first responders had searched for at least four hours, until 3 a.m, on Sunday night before suspending the search, having found “no evidence.” 

“We checked all over the area immediately around Stage and really, throughout all of Berne,” she said. “We checked every pond and swampy area we could think of, using our ATVs and a drone … The search was suspended but I know some of the chiefs went back and checked the area in daylight.”

Berne resident Joel Willsey, who lives on Stage Road and whose property the man’s car was found on before he was rescued, reported details of the operation to The Enterprise as events unfolded. 

He said that he and his houseguests, who were having a bonfire Sunday night, “could hear someone yell every couple minutes. Then rescue people were all over with drones and such.”

Willsey and his guests told them about the yells they had heard, he said, adding that it had been difficult to tell how far away they were, but they had a sense of the general direction.

“We went down to Sawmill Road to listen but then the creek was too loud to hear anything,” he said. “The yells apparently stopped. Couldn’t hear them from my house after that.”

Willsey told The Enterprise in a text, “Once they got the helicopter there they found the car and then the foot prints and found him thankfully.”

The man was found by 8 p.m. Monday evening, “cold and wet and in heavy brush about ½ mile from the car,” Apple wrote on Facebook, adding that the man was safe. Willsey had told The Enterprise around 6:45 p.m. on Monday that the man’s car had been found in the woods on his property but that the man hadn’t yet been located. 

“Nobody thought on Sunday night he would be ½ mile into the woods,” Willsey wrote in a text after the rescue. 

Molgard said after the rescue that Knapp’s car was “in the general vicinity of the original [phone] ping, but certainly couldn’t be seen from any of the roads.”

She said that the initial efforts focused on ponds and creeks because the first report was that Knapp had driven into water. 

It appears from old, regional news articles that Knapp is a former school superintendent from Middleburg, Pennsylvania, with tenures at Midd-West School District in Middleburg and Southwestern Vermont Supervisory Union in Bennington, Vermont. 

Apple wrote in his post that the sheriff’s office was assisted by the fire departments from Berne, Westerlo, and Onesquethaw, along with Helderberg Ambulance, state police, and county corrections officers. Molgard said that Knox and Altamont were involved as cover companies. 

Both Molgard and Helderberg Ambulance Captain Neal Hogan referred The Enterprise to the sheriff’s office for information on the search for Knapp, but it did not respond to inquiry before or after the man’s discovery.