Missing Children and Adults in the USA on Facebook has two recent posts about this. The latest he tells people to stop contacting him about Sam. He has already told the family how to find her. The post prior he details at great length how the search has been botched and how it should be conducted.
I just read that post. I won't post it all here because wow it is long, but the general idea is that he hopes that the family can put together a group of air scent dogs following his guidelines (he is only a consultant). He also suggests that they ask the following questions:
"Did she fall and possibly hit her head causing her to lose her direction of travel? Does she suffer from any medical issues that may hurt her reasoning skills?
Near the summit there are crevasses. Both rock, snow and ice. There’s also unstable rock, and rock fall. There are several mining caves and natural caves in the area as well as rock walls (Cliffs).
Did she make it back to the trailhead and did someone (bad) grab her and remove her from the area? While this isn’t usually the case, it did happen to a young lady last year on a similar hike.
Did she simply fall and get hurt or die?
Was she taken by a predator? Cougar or bear?
A trained Search dog team can answer all of these questions.
If a person becomes disoriented, they give off “Stress scent”."
Still, some of this post sounds like Monday-Morning quarterbacking. To be clear, I don't doubt his expertise, but some of these things that he is criticizing, he may not be 100% clear on law enforcement's thinking process, or he is relying too heavily on details from the family.
First, he criticizes the police for not setting up a containment zone. This was impossible at the beginning, because no one knew where or when she went missing. The only thing they could have done was shut down the whole park, which is hardly a containment area. They had no witnesses for a few days until it started making the news, and certainly no crucial ones. Once they did get witnesses, they were shutting down trails so that the dogs could search, effectively creating these containment zones.
Second, he says they could have searched at night. This is true. SAR dogs are trained to work through the night. However, there were only 14 dogs for the entire park. Certainly they couldn't expect both dog and handler to go 24 hours without any rest at all. This is inhumane. Again, there were only 14 dogs, so if they switched them out, say 50/50, that would mean only 7 dogs for miles and miles worth of area. The police might have thought it better to let the dogs rest during the night so they could fly the helicopter, which they did.
Third, he indicates that the police used FLIR and Infrared technology too late. As per the police department, as soon as they were able, they sent up helicopters equipped with FLIR technology. He also indicated the weakness of this, as FLIR cannot detect anything under about 3 feet worth of brush. This is an important consideration if Samantha was immobile and laying down. They also used Infrared at some point. Importantly, the mother accused them of not using either of these, but she was incorrect. The police department addressed this after she sent a swarm of people to their Facebook page and had them call the governor. The family has never addressed the fact that they said police weren't using FLIR when they actually were.
That being said, his post is very interesting for those who are interested in SAR dogs and how they work. The rest of the post details the advice that he gave the family on how they should be searching.
I am not a die hard police supporter in terms of thinking that they always do the right thing. I'm sure they bungled many things in this search, just like they do in many missing persons investigations. But I also think it's unfair to criticize the process without even having access to the public record yet. Samantha's mother said that that wouldn't even be available until October.