Thank you for posting this well researched article, Keres.
It answers all of the questions I had previously. I agree with John’s wife, Theresa, that John is likely somewhere near his truck:
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On June 1, she [Theresa Sturkie] will lead a volunteer search party to an area in the Mount San Jacinto State Park and Wilderness Area near Fuller Ridge.
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The Tuesday after he disappeared, Theresa filed a missing person’s report with the Oceanside Police Department. Then, every day for the next month she drove to the station to see if there was any news. She discovered that John did meet up with friends the night he left home, but only for a few hours before driving off. She also discovered there was no activity on her husband’s credit cards after Jan. 5, and the last activity on his phone was that same day at 6:42 p.m.
It wasn’t until Feb. 10, when Oceanside Police obtained a warrant for cellphone tower records that they discovered the last ‘ping’ on John’s phone was in the mountains near San Jacinto, Banning and Beaumont. Armed with this information, they searched the database of 911 calls in that area. They found a call report from Jan. 5 by three men who had met Sturkie that day on the Black Mountain Truck Trail northwest of Idyllwild.
Earlier this week, search leader [a mountain rescue expert Cathy] Tarr spoke with one of the men who placed the 911 call. He and his friends went up the 7,000-foot mountain on Jan. 5 to do some off-roading in a new truck. Just past the Fuller Ridge campground, which is eight miles from the nearest paved road, Highway 243, they came upon Sturkie, whose truck was stuck on the trail.
They helped Sturkie get his truck unstuck and the four men caravanned three miles further on the rough trail to a lower elevation,
where they stopped to shoot skeet and took a group photo. When they hit the trail’s end, they turned around to head back up the hill, but Sturkie’s tires couldn’t get traction and it got stuck four more times, Tarr said.
As they neared Fuller Ridge again, Sturkie’s truck got stuck again and was down to just 60 miles worth of gas. The men begged Sturkie to ride down the mountain with them because it was getting dark and snow was already falling.
Sturkie didn’t have a winter coat or any camping supplies, but he refused to leave his truck. When the men offered to alert a ranger to his whereabouts on their way out of the park, he told them he didn’t want anyone to know where he was, Tarr said.
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Worried for his safety, the men called 911 as soon as they could get cellphone reception as they drove down the mountain.
The call was sent to the Riverside County sheriff’s station in Cabazon. The men gave the 911 operator Sturkie’s name, license plate number and last known location. They also told the operator that Sturkie didn’t want assistance.
Sgt. Chris Mattson, who works at the Cabazon station but wasn’t there that day, said that
because the men told the 911 operator that Sturkie didn’t ask for assistance, it was classified as a disabled vehicle, not a rescue emergency, and the message was passed along to the California Highway Patrol.
Whether the CHP responded to the call is not known. It wasn’t until a month later, when the Oceanside Police contacted the station about its missing person case that deputies in Cabazon made the connection.
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Finally, on March 15, a hiker from the Idyllwild area was checking conditions on the nearby Pacific Crest Trail and spotted Sturkie’s truck buried to its door handles in snow. It was located three miles away from its former location near the campground and appeared to have skidded backward off the trail where it became lodged between boulders.
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John did have a life insurance policy, Theresa said, but a claim can’t be filed unless his body is recovered.
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Last weekend, Tarr said
she and Theresa found evidence that he filled a backpack with supplies to hike out. They also found one of his personal items about 100 feet in front of the truck, which could indicate his direction of travel, as well as more items on a nearby lookout ridge, where he may have walked to get his bearings.
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Search and rescue statistics show that when a person becomes lost, 75 percent of them are found within 2.7 miles of where they started, so Tarr is hopeful that if volunteers can comb a 3-mile radius of the truck in the new search area, they will find Sturkie’s body.
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