Missing teenager found after three years

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Connerjack Oswalt, who has autism, went missing in Clearlake on Sept. 28, 2019, when he was 16 years old. He was reported missing to the Clearlake Police Department the following day.

The search for him ended earlier this month after the Summit County Sheriff's Office found him outside Jeremy's Store in Summit Park.

“It boggles all of our minds,” Lt. Andrew Wright with the Summit County Sheriff’s Office said Friday. “It’s just a really miraculous discovery if you will.”

Several weeks before Oswalt's identity was confirmed, residents in the area began calling the sheriff's office to report seeing a homeless person pushing a cart. Wright said they did not have a lot of transients in the area because it gets very cold because of its high elevation.

Deputies made contact with the person several times and offered to help him find shelter, but he always refused and would not give his name, Wright said.

On April 9, a person called the sheriff's office and said a young man was sleeping outside a gas station. When deputies arrived, the person was cold so they let him warm up in a patrol vehicle. This time, deputies scanned the person's fingerprint.

Wright said they got a hit for an arrest warrant out of Nevada for assault on a police officer. The warrant was issued in February but spelled Oswalt's last name wrong, according to Wright.

Suspecting that there was more to the story, deputies did some more digging and came across a missing person poster for Oswalt in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database. When contacted, both Clearlake police and Oswalt's mother confirmed that he was still missing.

Immediately, Oswalt's family drove from Idaho Falls, Idaho, where they had relocated, to Utah to be reunited with him.

I read this story when it came out. Some of the comments to it were dumb. It didn't occur to readers that maybe this boy ran away from home because he was being abused? He didn't run away because he's autistic. In fact, that's the last thing an autistic person, who feels safe at home, would want to do -- going out into a world of STRANGERS. .........