I'm told the family has hired another private investigator. Let's hope the new P.I. has better luck and/or resources than the last one.
I hope so too. It is simply my own belief that if Bryce is alive, then is suffering from a mental illness. He is not running from any severe problems, and on the day he went missing he was calling his mom. Clearly, his relationship with his mother is good enough that he would contact her if he could.
I could just see this guy all scruffy and living in a homeless area. He would be "self-medicating" with drugs and alcohol which would make his schizophrenia even worse. I do not see how a PI will help at this point, unless that PI is willing to go full-on boots on the ground.
How I would go about it? Well, there are people who float in and out of the homeless/very low end socioeconomic group and the rest of the world: teenage runaways and their like. Go around and ask people like them if they have seen him. Go to the areas of cities where these people congregate. One of the things these people do with regularity is use library computers to see if they need to check in with their probation officer. Why not have a program where the screensaver/homepage of public libraries has missing person's info?
I have seen this is real life before. A person with schizophrenia can be so out of it that they really do not know where they are, how they got there, how to contact friends and family, etc. When my friend with schizophrenia quit taking her meds, she did not recognize her own child.
Bryce's family has been way more open than many family's of missing persons and I applaud them for it. They seem to indicate that Bryce was having a "hard time" in the year or so leading up to his disappearance. That is
exactly what happened to my friend. For an entire year before she really went downhill, she just seemed to be having a hard time. Weird stuff was happening to her that did not make sense. She greatly increased her smoking, drinking, and pot smoking. She went from a college-educated person with a job to a person with no home, no car, etc.
The problem is that scruffy homeless man who is "crazy" and who maybe does not have great hygiene (another issue my friend had) may be in plain sight and still not be seen.