Authorities identified a young man with autism who slept at a Utah gas station as the missing boy Connorjack Oswalt last week. 3 Connorjack Oswalt disappeared in September 2019Credit: Summit County Sheriff’s Office 3 Summit County Police Find Oswalt Outside a Cold Gas StationCredit: Summit County Sheriff’s Office Sheriff Justin Martinez said Oswalt, now 19, was shivering in the cold outside a Summit County gas station when lawmakers found him. In the weeks leading up to the April 9 intervention by law enforcement, the sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post that it had received and responded to numerous reports of a homeless man pushing around a shopping cart. Upon arrival at the gas station in the greater Park City area, deputies offered the man to sit inside one of the officer’s patrol cars, where he could warm up as they examined the man’s identity. “Through previous interactions and Saturday interaction, it was clear to MPs that the man was communicating differently,” the sheriff’s office said in the post, including an autism awareness hashtag. The police eventually persuaded Oswalt to let them take his fingerprint, which led them to discover that he had a previous arrest warrant. A facilitator then looked at the pages on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website, where he found a missing poster for Oswalt posted by his desperate parents. The National System of Missing and Unidentified Persons says Oswalt was diagnosed with autism in 2014 and had a “history of absconding.” The teenager went missing in September 2019 from Clearlake, California, about an 11-hour drive from Summit County. When lawmakers contacted Oswalt’s mother, he was able to confirm his identity by a mark on his neck. Oswalt’s father, Gerald Flint, and his grandfather drove four hours from their current home in Idaho Falls, Park City, to meet him personally and reunite. “Everyone in the room cried. “They went up and down, they put in working hours,” Flint told KCRA. “They could have rejected it, but they did not, and that made a difference in the world.” As soon as Flint recognized Oswalt from his bullet, he called his mother to convey the emotional news. In a video provided by CNN, Oswalt’s mother is reportedly heard receiving emotional news of her son’s return. “My sweetheart is alive,” said Oswalt’s mother, Suzanne Flint, weeping. “There was no dry eye in the room,” Martinez told CBS. “They have reunited with this person they had not seen for three years when he was 16 years old. It’s 19 now. “ Oswalt’s family is looking forward to his return home as he continues to receive care and resources in Utah as of Saturday night. Although Summit County officials said the boy appeared to have been living on the streets there for about two weeks, his whereabouts for the past two years remain unclear. 3 Oswalt diagnosed with autism in 2014 Credit: Summit County Sheriff’s Office
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