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Susan Flint didn’t know that she was losing her son while preparing lunch.
But when it came time to eat the quesadillas she prepared one day in September 2019, 17-year-old Connerjack Oswalt was gone, the Associated Press reported. Oswalt, who had previously been diagnosed with autism and mental illness, had a history of running and had already done so earlier that year.
For the next two years, his mother looked for him. She posted flyers, scanned social media posts and searched national databases on missing children, the AP reported. She checked the morgues. When a wildfire severely damaged her home in Clearlake, California, she fled to Idaho, hoping her son would return to his homeland.
“I never stopped looking for him. There was not a day that I did not look for him in some form or way, “she told the AP.
Her husband and Oswalt’s stepfather, Gerald Flint, were right there with her as every promising trail faded into disappointment. They feared they would never see him again, according to the AP.
“We’ve had a lot of false hopes for the last two and a half years,” Gerald Flint told KSTU.
Then, earlier this month, the couple received another clue: a call from Utah sheriff’s deputies who believe the 19-year-old man they found sleeping and trembling in front of a gas station on April 9 was Oswalt, according to the sheriff’s office. Summit County Office Post on Facebook. Their foreboding grew stronger when they found a birthmark on the man’s neck, similar to what his mother described, CNN reported.
Gerald Flint quit his job and drove about 240 miles to Summit County to see if his adopted son had finally been found or if it was another dead end.
Summit County residents were worried about the man, who looked homeless and had been spotted pushing a shopping cart over the past few weeks – some so much that they called police. Every time the sheriff’s deputies checked on him, they found that the man obeyed the law and was not receptive to their offers of help.
Deputies sent him on his way.
Then, on April 9, a “really concerned” resident told the sheriff’s office about a young man sleeping in front of a local grocery store. When the deputies arrived, they found the man they had been dealing with before. At the time, he seemed to have been homeless for several weeks and was trembling, “obviously [having] hard night, “Summit County Sheriff Justin Martinez told KSTU.
Deputies persuaded him to sit in their cruiser to keep warm. Although he did not give them his name, he allowed them to scan his fingerprint. Got hit: “Konjac Oswald” – written in “d” – who had an arrest warrant from February outside Nevada.
Instead of arresting him, the sheriff’s office continued to dig, in part because “it was clear to lawmakers that the man was communicating differently,” and they thought there was more to the story, according to the sheriff’s office. Dispatchers began browsing the database of cases from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. After 16 pages of names and photos, they found one for Connerjack Oswalt, a teenager who disappeared from California two and a half years earlier. Investigators tracked down and contacted Flints after they “felt confident in their identification.”
After Gerald Flint arrived from Idaho Falls and examined the man, who is believed to be his stepson, he pulled out his phone. With deputies around him, Flint called his wife.
– Is it him? she asked.
“A little older,” Gerald told her, “but yes.”
“My darling is alive,” she said as she sobbed on the phone.
Social workers responded to help Oswalt after he was identified, USA Today reported. He is still receiving care at a Utah hospital, although the Flint family eventually plans to return him to his home in Idaho Falls.
Investigators are still trying to find out how he got to Utah and what happened between his disappearance and April 9.
“That remains the big question,” Summit County Sheriff’s Lt. Andrew Wright told USA Today. “Where has his journey taken him in the last two and a half years?”
At the moment, his mother is just happy to know where he is.
“We are just grateful that he is safe and alive and that our son is back,” she told KSTU. “That’s the most important thing for us.”
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