By MONROE ROARK
mroark@thecitizennews.com

Wal-Mart executives visited the Fayette Pavilion store last week along with representatives of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to make a special presentation and commemorate the recent recovery of two missing children right here in Fayette County.

Tom Montgomery, head of Wal-mart's Good Works program, presented a check for $150,000 to NCMEC president Ernie Allen as dozens of Wal-Mart employees cheered the recent success of the retail giant's partnership with the center.

For the past three years, posters of missing children have been displayed in about 2,400 Wal-Mart stores and 450 SAM's Clubs nationwide. A total of 2,107 children have been featured since January 1996, and more than 1,100 of those have been located.

Allen said last week that 31 of those recoveries can be directly attributed to Wal-Mart's participation in the program, which struck paydirt locally a few months ago.

A man working at a construction site in the area noticed for several days that two young boys accompanied another man to the site every day. Realizing that the boys were not in school anywhere, he became suspicious about the situation.

Then one day in November, he walked into the Wal-Mart at Fayette Pavilion and saw pictures of the two boys, who were missing from their home in Virginia, having possibly been taken by their father.

The man contacted authorities, and the youths reunited with their mother Nov. 10.