Hundreds scour woods and farmland for 4-year-old Raul Johnson.

LAURINBURG — The family of 4-year-old Raul Johnson distributed “missing person” posters and prayed for his safe return while several hundred people searched Thursday for the lost child in the woods and farmland of Scotland County.

Raul disappeared Wednesday morning after leaving his home on Village Drive in southern Scotland County. His grandfather had been babysitting him.

Sheriff Ralph Kersey expressed optimism on Thursday morning that Raul would have found a way to keep warm in the hay fields and nearby livestock farms when the temperature dropped to 25 on Wednesday night. But Thursday night was also forecast to be in the mid-20s.

Raul, whom his sister said is the youngest of eight children, lives in a small mobile home neighborhood less than 2,000 feet from the South Carolina line. The area has fields of cotton, collards, other crops and livestock.

When Raul left his house on Wednesday, he was barefoot and dressed only in pajamas, Kersey said.

“When this child home yesterday, wandering, the first place he went to was a neighbor right there,” Kersey said. “She spoke with the child, said, ‘You need to go home.’

“And that was the direction that he was headed when she last saw him,” Kersey said. This was around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, he said.

Raul’s grandfather visited neighbors to try to find Raul, Kersey said, because Raul on Tuesday had gone to a neighbor’s house the day before.

The Sheriff’s Office was contacted between 11:30 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. Wednesday.

Law enforcement and civilian volunteers from North and South Carolina converged on Wednesday afternoon to try to find the boy. Kersey said as many as 200 professionals plus 100 volunteers searched on Thursday with assistance from a plane, helicopters and and drone aircraft.

Family members, including Raul’s cousin Bonnie Bearden and aunt Ellen Locklear, also looked. Bearden said they searched through paths in the woods, in barns and even in small culverts but saw no sign of Raul.

The search focused on a 2-mile radius around Raul’s home, Kersey said — about as far as a barefoot 4-year-old might have gone.

The professionals looked for clues such as footprints and bent branches that might lead them to the boy, he said. Three tracking dogs followed a trail to pond, and a dive team from the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office searched those waters, he said.

Dogs trained to find cadavers also have searched, Kersey said, but they turned up nothing.

Although the case is being handled as a missing-person matter, the Sheriff’s Office is not ruling out the possibility that Raul was abducted or otherwise is the victim of foul play, Kersey said. Authorities have sought security video from cameras at nearby homes, he said, had search dogs sniff vehicles and, with residents’ permission, looked in their homes.

The family continues to worry, said Raul’s Aunt Kasey Locklear and sister, 17-year-old Cheyenne Johnson.

They had pictures of a little boy with a big smile. He likes playing with trucks, with the neighborhood dogs and recently got his own puppy. The puppy appears to be a shepherd mix and has one brown eye and one blue eye.

“He’s a happy child,” Cheyenne said.

The family has been asking God to bring Raul back, Locklear said.

“Just keeping the faith, keeping hope that he’s going to come back safe,” she said.

Staff writer Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@fayobserver.com and 486-3512.