Conerjak Oswalt was shivering and cold when his sheriff’s deputies met him Saturday at a grocery store in Summit County, known for its ski areas, said Sheriff Justin Martinez. Oswalt seemed to have been living on the streets there for about two weeks. His family has been looking for him for years, handing out leaflets, scanning social media and desperately chasing fruitless opportunities. They even returned to his hometown of Idaho Falls, hoping he would eventually return. “Any hints of something very similar to him, we would watch,” said his father, Gerald Flint. “It was a real nightmare.” Oswalt, who has been diagnosed with autism and other mental health problems, was 17 when he left the family home in Clearlake, California. His mother, Suzanne Flint, remembered making quesadillas, but when it came time for lunch, he was gone. “I never stopped looking for him. There was not a day that I did not look for him, in any form or way,” he said. The exact circumstances of his disappearance and where he has been for the past two years are under investigation, police said. Ρον Serving with compassion 💙 In the last two weeks, many in our community have called us for a homeless … Posted by Summit County Sheriff – Utah on Wednesday, April 13, 2022 What his family knows is that after lawmakers found Oswalt at the Utah convenience store, they asked if he would like to come with their patrol car and warm up. He agreed and finally let the officers take a fingerprint. This led to a pending warrant from February in Nevada. “The MPs just felt that there was something there, something beyond a criminal warrant. There was a humanitarian effort that needed to be further investigated,” Martinez said. Police began working in shifts through the bureaucracy, searching for reports of missing and threatened children. About 16 pages inside, they found a 2019 missing person report from Clearlake, California. Although he had a slightly different spelling of the name from the Nevada warrant, the photos matched and invited his family. When the Flints first received the call, they were worried that their son had been found dead. After his wife confirmed the identification through a birthmark, Gerald Flint quit his job, jumped in his car and drove to Utah for four hours. “Everyone in the room cried. They went up and down, they worked long hours,” he said. “They could have rejected it, but they did not, and that made a difference in the world.” Social workers with knowledge of autism took care of Oswalt after he was reunited with his family, said Lt. Andrew Wright of the Summit County Sheriff. His family hopes to bring him back home soon. “We did not treat him as a criminal. We treated him as someone who has something deeper to look for,” Martinez said. “It is this intuition that really reunited this family.”
