teen with autism found alive in shivering cold Utah parking lot 3 years after vanishing from California

Oswalt appeared to be homeless and had been reportedly living on the streets there for about two weeks.

His family had searched for him for years, handing out fliers, scanning social media, and desperately chasing down fruitless leads. They even moved back to the town of his birth, Idaho Falls, hoping he would eventually make it back there.

“Any hints at something that remotely resembled him, we would follow up on it,” said his stepfather, Gerald Flint. “It’s been a real nightmare.”

Oswalt, who has been diagnosed with autism and other mental health conditions, was 17 when he left the family’s home in Clearlake, California. His mother, Suzanne Flint, remembered making quesadillas, but when it was time for lunch he was gone.

“I never stopped looking for him. There wasn’t a day I wasn’t searching for him, in some form or fashion,” she said. The exact circumstances of his disappearance and whereabouts over the last two years are under investigation, police said.

Deputies had encountered Oswalt multiple times in past weeks but the teenager refused their help when they reached out for services until finally agreeing to be seek warmth in a patrol car at the freezing gas station.

That led them to an outstanding warrant from February in Nevada.

The officers set to work shifting through paperwork, looking for reports of missing and endangered children. About 16 pages in, they found a 2019 missing person report from Clearlake, California. Though it had a slightly different name spelling from the Nevada warrant, the photos matched and they called his family.