Runaway Dylan returns home

By Shaun Inguanzo
A NOBLE PARK child who caused family and friends emotional distress with his disappearance earlier this week will not be given a bike for Christmas after he had used a friend’s to flee to Cheltenham.
The painstaking wait ended for a Noble Park family at 8pm on Tuesday after 11-year-old Dylan Spiby was found safe and well.
Dylan sparked a state-wide manhunt by police, family and friends after he went missing from his Noble Park home last Sunday evening.
An emergency assembly was called at his school, Wallarano Primary in Noble Park, earlier this week to ask students if they knew of Dylan’s whereabouts.
Dylan’s mother, Danielle Spiby, and father, Blair Coxsedge, were distraught and feared the worst after searching Springvale and Noble Park without success.
Mr Coxsedge said after Dylan had been missing for almost three days that he was constantly fighting back tears as the family was coming to terms with what they feared could be a horrific situation.
“It is going to make things very difficult for us, we have got three little girls who are distressed, and his mum is ill as a result, and has not slept,” Mr Coxsedge said prior to Dylan being found.
“We are totally traumatised, thinking the ultimate evil might have gotten to him.”
Mr Coxsedge said one of Dylan’s friends had given him a digital camera believed to have been taken from a teacher at a school disco last Friday.
Mr Coxsedge said he found Dylan with the camera and would make sure it was returned to the school.
He said the “kids would bear the consequences” handed down by the school.
He said he believed this had caused Dylan, who suffers from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), to not return home on Sunday evening.
Following national media coverage about Dylan’s disappearance, Springvale police received more than 760 phone calls of reported sightings.
Dylan was found near Southland Shopping Centre on Tuesday night.
It was the same location that a grade three student at his Noble Park primary school had reported seeing him on Monday.
Mr Coxsedge said the family was ecstatic that Dylan had been found safe and well.
“We are over the moon, we found him four streets away from the shopping centre,” he said.
“He had a bike he got from a mate at school.
“He said he had tried to come home Monday, but got totally lost, or so he says.
“(His mum) is over the moon, actually, she is taking him up to school to see the principal.”
Mr Coxsedge said Christmas was “back on” for the family, but it would reconsider giving him the bike it bought after noting he had ridden to Cheltenham using a friend’s bike.
“Christmas is back on, for sure, I can tell you,” he said.
“Dylan was getting a bike but we’ve decided to maybe postpone it and go in another direction.”
Mr Coxsedge said Dylan’s three younger sisters were ‘absolutely rapt’ with the return of their brother.