Hundreds attend boy’s memorial

BOISE – An 8-year-old boy who was missing for more than a week before his body was found floating in a canal has been laid to rest at a Boise cemetery.

Nearly 500 members of the community and an Idaho National Guard contingent attended a public memorial service for Robert Manwill on Sunday at the Cloverdale Funeral Home and Memorial Park.

The group represented a portion of the 2,330 community volunteers who helped search for the boy, who disappeared July 24 after leaving his mother’s apartment in Boise.

The boy lived with his father, Charles Manwill, in New Plymouth, Idaho, and was visiting his mother the night he vanished.

The death is an active homicide investigation. There is no evidence the boy was abducted by a stranger, according to the Boise Police Department. Authorities have not named any suspects.

At the funeral, family members wept as doves were released and circled above the crowd.

The Rev. George Sova, who led the service, read letters from the boy’s parents.

“My memory that I will hold tightly is of you in the ocean. You were frolicking in the waves and shrieking in delight, and you didn’t want to come out of the water,” wrote Melissa Jenkins, the boy’s mother.

Charles Manwill wrote about his son’s exuberance. He said he often told people the boy was “100 pounds of energy packed into 50 pounds of body.”

Funeral services were held in the cemetery where the boy’s grandfather and half-brother, Michael, were laid to rest.

Charles Manwill’s former wife stabbed their son, 4-year-old Michael, in the chest in 1993. Silke Fatma Manwill pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was released from federal prison in 2002.