Connerjack Oswalt, 19, vanished from his home in Clearlake, California, in 2019 when he was 16. Police in Park City, Utah, discovered him outside a gas station on April 9 and realized he was a missing teen after taking his fingerprints.
A young man found outside on a frigid night near the resort town of Park City, Utah, was discovered to be the teenager who had been reported missing from California three years ago, authorities said.
Police responded to a gas station on April 9 after a "concerned community member" reported seeing the man sleeping there, the Summit County Sheriff's Office said in a Facebook post. The sheriff’s deputies offered the man to sit inside their car to escape the cold, and as he got warm, they tried to find out more about him.
"Through past interactions and the Saturday interaction, it was clear to deputies that the man communicated differently," the sheriff's office post read. The post also included an autism awareness hashtag.
They took his fingerprints in the car and discovered they seemed to be a match for Connerjack Oswalt, an autistic teenager who vanished from his home in Clearlake, California, in 2019 when he was 16.
The sheriff’s office contacted the missing teen’s family and his stepfather, Gerald Flint, drove to Utah and from there, let his wife, Connerjack’s mother, know he had finally been found.
“He’s my baby, you know?” Suzanne Flint, Connerjack’s mom, told Inside Edition.
“I never stopped looking,” she said.
“Every day,” Gerald said.
Authorities are trying to determine how Connerjack ended up in Park City, 700 miles away from his home and what happened between his disappearance and April 9.
Summit County Sheriff Justin Martinez said everyone was moved by the homecoming. “Everybody in that room was a parent. How could you not be that emotional?” he said.
“What the sheriffs did is incredible,” his mother told Inside Edition. “It was like winning a billion dollars.”
