runspired
Verified Insider - Philip Kreycik discussion
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2021
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- 51
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It's unlikely he had a paper map: that trailhead doesn't offer them. If he knew about the spigot it would have been from looking at maps the night before/morning of on his phone. We don't have his phone and thus as volunteers don't have his phone browsing history (though PPD would), his desktop browsing history while it has a number of things of interest for how his morning developed (like determining where to drop off a return and how to return the item he was returning) doesn't show any searches for things about the park.
We're looking at search radiuses that start from both car and the footprints. The radius from the car is well searched by both volunteers and SAR, that's not to say something wasn't missed (still plenty of miscibility in there), but the radius from the footprint locations has not been as thoroughly combed yet and we're working on that now. Part of the reason for the search not having turned more south/southwest/west is the existence of that fountain: if he turned south and stays on trails there's a decent chance he comes across that fountain.
also, this is kinda what I came here to hopefully turn folks attention to. We have no reason to suspect Philip self-disappeared. There's of course always potential for externalities that no-one can predict (like serial killer / random person hits him with car and hides body / stumbles onto wrong property and gets shot etc.), but if those externalities are the answer then speculation will do us no good and it's a matter of waiting long enough for something to come out. Pleasanton though is not a place that generally lends itself to these sorts of externalities, and these sorts of externalities tend to leave some evidence behind in noticeable locations: so unless something turns up out-of-the-park which of course would change everything, the assumption and Occam's razor have to be that he's still in there and has been missed. This isn't unheard of, people go missing in parks and get missed by searches all the time. So the most helpful thing right now is not speculating on all the possible externalities that we have no way of investigating, and instead focusing on the info we do have about the park and determining where we should be focusing on searching, where within that we still have gaps to fill, and where we may have missed something.
A fun recent story about how easy it can be to miss a very large item: we recently found a well that was 6'x8', uncovered, ground level (almost no lip), 15' deep before water, 3-4' deep water in the bottom, in a high traffic area of the park just off two different trails (between them). Park seems to have had no knowledge this existed, and we had multiple search teams not discover this and multiple looking for it specifically who repeatedly missed it once we knew the general area.
That's an item that's roughly 4x as big in surface area as a full-bodied person being missed repeatedly, and given wildlife we're looking for less than a full-bodied person and possibly just some shoe remnants. We've got a number of similar stories from tracking down the sources of decomposing odors.