I agree with you about suicide without a body recovery being the most likely scenario here (unfortunately). I seem to remember another cold case (Dermot Kelly, maybe?) where the father's obituary listed the missing child as pre-deceasing him, while the mother's obituary listed him as surviving her (and she died after the father, so it wasn't that Dermot's fate became known in between his parents' deaths). In that particular case, all signs point to a drowning, probably suicide, but no body was found...and I think his parents' obituaries just show that different family members cope in different ways. Some see false hope as being needlessly cruel, while others see false hope as at least being hope.
I just think it's too odd that the disappearance of a relatively young man, who went missing at a time when plenty of people were dependent on the internet for news and communication, isn't more widely publicized online. (Not odd/sinister, just odd/unexpected.) The only possible thing I could think of that might influence things is that, depending on which disappearance date you go by, he either went missing two weeks before, or two weeks after, 9/11. Granted, he went missing on the other side of the country, but maybe there was an especially strong sentiment of "Eh, he's missing voluntarily, and we've got far bigger things to worry about right now" at that time. Also, I remember that I had to attend a conference out of state in late September of that year, and it was quite iffy if flights would have resumed by then. I was able to take the flight, but the two closest airports were still shutdown, so my departure airport was changed to one pretty far away because it was one of the few airports in the midwest that was opened back up that soon afterwards. So maybe his family had a difficult time finding a way to get out to San Francisco to look for him or to publicize his disappearance at the time?
