I drove out last week to Indiana through Northwest Ohio. Every time I go through that part of the state I think about Andrew, Alexander, and Tanner. We need to kick this back into high gear again. 3 years is 3 years too long - these boys need to be home!!
So I read all the threads last night from the very first. I wanted to refresh my memory and get a new perspective, and I did. Here are some of my thoughts:
The critical window of time was 4-7 AM on Friday morning. I mapped the route from Morenci, MI to Kunkle, OH to Wauseon, OH and back to Morenci. This is very roughly I think the area he drove based on the searches. That drive all the way through and back to beginning would take an hour and a half. That only leaves an hour and a half to do whatever else he did in that time frame. But the cell phone pings should have been able to narrow this down even more right? If I was the police, here's what I would have expected to see - pings every now and then from towers along the way, and then at some point, the phone pinging off of one tower or back and forth between two tours for a longer period of time, and then again pinging at intervals on the way home. In which case I'm going to center my search around the place the pings were at for that longer period of time - roughly a few miles either way of that one or two towers. That may in fact be what the police have done.
So I'm guessing he started pinging away from his house around 4 AM and back around his house again at 7 am. Otherwise, if he was back at the house by say 6, our timeline would be shorter.
Did anyone actually see the boys with him that morning? I thought I remembered someone thought they did. If not, he could have just been disposing of evidence and the actual disappearance time window could be over 12 hours wider. Yikes. Of course that would mean his phone would have been off for that time because any other long car trip time pings in that day and I'm sure LE would have been all over that too.
What are sites in and around the little towns in that area (Kunkle, West Liberty, Holiday City, etc.) where a minivan pulled off would go unnoticed? What portions of these areas have/have not been searched? Which abandoned buildings have/have not been checked? I'm not sold on the JS broke his ankle at his home story. I think he may have broken it running in the woods or tripped on a root or stepped in a gopher hole or some or climbing down an embankment, and losing his balance, etc. Something. So where might a minivan pull off unnoticed AND terrain be wooded or uneven or open fields that are NOT farmland (because I think farmers would have noticed footprints, turned earth, odd things and reported it.)
What would be the value of TES or the other org I can't think of right now coming out and searching after all this time?
Did we ever find out why JS supposedly wanted his friend to take him to the hospital in Wauseon? I thought that was so odd since he had just been in roughly that same area. My theory has always been that he was pretty close to a breakdown right then - but from fear, not grief. I think he wanted to kind of see what activity was like in that area. Wanted to just see that there weren't sirens all over the place, that life was continuing on as normal in NW Ohio - wanted to see that whatever he may have hid out there was secure.
Have we ever made a really good timeline of everything we know about those last 72 hours or so in order piece by piece? If not, we should. If so, can someone point me to it because I didn't see one, or maybe would like to add to it.