"I just want my baby to come home": Mom asks for help looking desperately for Maddox Ritch, six, missing

While the FBI and local authorities are desperately searching for a 6-year-old boy who has disappeared from a park in North Carolina, his crying mother is urging people to "keep praying for him because I just want to go home" .

Maddox Ritch, a 6-year-old autistic man who does not speak, disappeared Saturday with his family at Rankin Lake Park in Gastonia, police said. A $ 10,000 reward is offered, the authorities said at a press conference on Tuesday.

"Maddox is my whole world and my reason for living," said her mother, Carrie Ritch, at the press conference.

His mother said that Maddox loved the park, the bouncy balls and the teddy bears. "Her smile is so contagious and her laugh is so precious."

WSOC

"If you were in the park on Saturday and you saw Maddox … please, call the phone line urgently," said Ritch, crying. "I want my baby in my arms."

As Maddox's mother asked for help on Tuesday, her father traced her route into the park with the investigators, the authorities said.

Maddox has blond hair and blue eyes, weighs 45 pounds and is 4 feet tall, the police said. According to the police, he was wearing black shorts, closed-toed sandals and an orange t-shirt that read "I am the man" when he disappeared.

Hundreds of people were in the park on Saturday, the police said. The authorities are still looking to meet with people present, including a professional photographer who takes pictures of a family and a jogger that the police have not been able to & # 39; 39; identify.

Authorities also monitored dozens of dumpsters, searched the lake in the park with sonar and divers, and inspected the area with helicopters and drones, the police said.

Gastonia Police Department

The authorities have also recorded messages from Maddox's parents and are spreading the messages in the woods in the hope that their voices will persuade him to go out if he is there, FBI special agent Jason Kaplan said Monday.

Former FBI agent and ABC News contributor Brad Garrett said the idea of ​​spreading the familiar voices of Maddox's parents made sense.

Children with special needs "tend to be very close to their parents," Garrett told ABC News. "If you have a child who can not really communicate but his parents talk to him every day … I fully understand why they would do it."

Garrett said the FBI probably recorded the sentences that Maddox's parents use with him most often.

Anyone who was in Rankin Lake Park on Saturday is asked to call the hotline at 704-869-1075.

"We talked to a lot of people who were there, but we want to make sure we talk to them all," Gastonia police chief Robert Helton said in a statement released Monday by the police. "No information is too small, anything you think may be insignificant could be helpful for our case."