'We've potentially got no real boundaries for the search anymore.'
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'We've exhausted the obvious': 2 weeks on, friend reveals details on missing Bay Area runner
Over two weeks since the mystifying disappearance of a Bay Area man at a well-trafficked park, a friend has posted a lengthy Q&A about the search, clues and frustrating dead-ends.
Friend and fellow runner Chris Thoburn wrote in his Q&A (you can
read it in its entirety here) that they've verified Kreycik's whereabouts leading up to his disappearance. CCTV at a UPS store where Kreycik was dropping off a package (a returned item, Thoburn says) shows him entering and leaving the lot, and traffic cameras and the car's FastTrak also trace him to the staging area.
Scent dogs were only able to track Kreycik from his car to the trailhead, Thoburn said.
"Unfortunately they aren't as amazing as some folks in the comments would have you believe," he wrote. "... When you have a family, share your car with your wife, and do laundry together pretty much all scent articles are contaminated in some way. The family tried hard to give uncontaminated items to [search and rescue] for the search, but ultimately it seemed the dogs would instead pick up on the scent of others in the area."
Family and friends had a brief glimmer of hope on the fourth day of the search when two residents adjacent to park
heard cries for help. Thoburn spoke with them, but never heard the voice himself. A search of the canyon yielded nothing. "I do believe they truly did hear that sound," he wrote. "My personal take is they heard someone else in the distance yelling 'Philip' of which there were a LOT of folks doing that night and which sounds a ton like 'help' in that canyon."
When asked for his best guess as to why Kreycik has yet to be found, despite extensive searches by hundreds of volunteers, law enforcement and trained search and rescue crews, Thoburn speculated heat exhaustion took its toll on his friend. It is unclear if Kreycik carried water with him, and temperatures in the area hit a soaring 105 degrees that day. The terrain in the park, which spans a large area between Pleasanton and Hayward in the East Bay Regional Park District, is rugged and steep, and the creeks are currently without much water.
"Philip was NOT heat adapted," Thoburn wrote. "He lived on the Oakland/Berkeley border and most of his training was on the Bay side of the ridge. This means he rarely ran in temps above 80, and morning and evening runs (where he typically had time) would have been in the 50s or 60s."
"He [may have gotten] dizzy from the heat, wandered into a ravine for either shade or shortcut, fell, got stuck, and either he's still there or wildlife has encountered him since," he added. "In either case we're looking for something hard to find: harder if it's the latter. If he's in there, the bottoms of ravines after rains will probably be where remains will eventually turn up. If we don't find him soon you'll find me out there in them often in the coming months/years."
As for next steps, Thoburn says Kreycik's loved ones aren't giving up. Friends and family still walk the park every day, with searches coordinated via their
12,000-member public Facebook group. The few leads they had have long since dried up, but Thoburn would still like to get in touch with a possible witness "who may have seen Philip on the ridge that day." To that end, some volunteers continue to speak with people on the trail, asking if anyone was in the park on July 10 and may have inadvertently seen something important.
"I feel we've exhausted the obvious, and what's left is little nooks and downed trees we maybe didn't get eyes around as well as we should have in the first pass or two," Thoburn wrote. "So I've been spending my evenings wandering those areas systematically, but also connecting the dots on the exact locations of all the 'unofficial' trails: been trying as hard as I can to both think like a runner, think like a runner in distress, and think like a runner in distress making irrational decisions. The trouble is, if it's the third, we've potentially got no real boundaries for the search anymore."
"My hope from fairly early in this search has been that he did make it out of the park. The odds are far better for his survival if he did," he added. "That said, we have no evidence that he made it out, and our search for video at potential exit points has turned up nothing so far.
"All signs currently still point to him having gone for a run in the park and not having left it."
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