Many questions about the disappearance of West Virginia University neurologist John Lawson Magruder are still unanswered – the Monongalia County Sheriff’s Office said investigators are continuing to follow up on any leads about his possible whereabouts, but had no further updates on the case Wednesday.
Law enforcement suspended a search of the Coopers Rock State Park area for Magruder Monday, after covering over 842 acres of the park and dedicating 1,000 man hours to the search. Magruder is described as a white male, 5-foot-11, and weighing approximately 260 pounds.
Part of the search party was Mountaineer Area Rescue Group (MARG). President Lee Fuell, with the search and rescue team talked about his organization and how it works to find missing people.
While he wasn’t able to discuss specifics about the doctor’s case, Fuell said MARG employed all of its search capabilities and supported the sheriff’s decision to suspend the search.
Fuell said MARG is a nonprofit, non-governmental search team. Teams like MARG do not have formal authorities, but are often called to aid law enforcement, emergency medical services and other agencies with jurisdiction over a search area. The legal responsibility for lost and missing persons is on law enforcement.
“The best way to put it is we are effectively a specialized subcontractor,” Fuell said. “We bring specialized skills to bear on those kinds of problems when an agency having jurisdiction asks us to do that.”
Most of what MARG does involves looking for children, elderly people with Alzheimer’s or dementia who are confused or people who are undergoing some kind of medical or behavioral mental health problem that affects their reasoning, Fuell said.
“It is extremely rare for a cognitively competent adult to get lost anymore,” he said, due to cell phones and other technology. He acknowledged it does happen, particularly in areas where phone signals may not be available, like Coopers Rock.
The time law enforcement waits to call groups like MARG in for searches depends on factors like previous history of the person, Fuell said, and will differ for every case.
There are times MARG and other search groups may be dispatched immediately in response to a 911 call, but are usually called in after law enforcement investigates and determines the need for the group’s expertise.
“If it’s a wildlife area or something like that, or someone’s lost out in the woods, they’ll probably dispatch us out immediately,” Fuell explained. “Otherwise, you’re going to get law enforcement and maybe a fire department response to the call.
“If you live in Morgantown and your son didn’t get home from school on time or something, the police are gonna come and they’re going to conduct an initial investigation. If they determine that a large-scale, wide-area search is required and that they require specialized search resources, they’ll call someone like us to do that.”
When initially investigating, law enforcement called to a missing person’s case will determine their last known position or LKP, Fuell said.
“Sometimes that is the last known place they were seen or some other piece of evidence that tells us where that is,” he said.
That type of evidence could be something like a car found near a trail the missing person was thought to be hiking on.
Magruder’s vehicle was found in a parking lot at Coopers Rock.
Fuell said the LKP is the most important part of the process at the beginning and missing person incidents can be made or broken in the first hour or so, depending on the initial response.
Once the LKP is established, law enforcement or SAR teams will complete what is called a lost person questionnaire (LPQ).
This step is where searchers try to find out everything they can about the person they are searching for. They will want to know if the person has ever done this before? Were they a smoker – if so, what brand? What is their shoe size? Any details available are helpful.
Fuell said this information is important, “So when we search we’re not just looking for the person – we’re looking for clues.”
If possible, a direction of travel will then be established, he said. This can be difficult around the person’s home because their tracks are likely more numerous around their home. A direction can be easier to find if the LKP is away from the home – like if their car was found in a parking lot.
Search groups use different methods to determine a direction of travel, Fuell said.
One is to use specially trained people called man trackers, who look for tracks or partial tracks or evidence of human passage on the ground, in the brush, wherever they see disturbance.
“This is a really, really tedious kind of thing,” he said. “And you’ve spent a lot of hours training.”
Fuell said they also can use trailing dogs that focus on a specific scent that could be obtained from any article with the missing person’s scent – even the interior of a car.
The trained dogs get centered on that scent and can track it and hopefully find something.
There are limitations with dogs because outside events like rainstorms can dispense the scent, but Fuell said even if directional assets can’t take them all the way to the person, they can theoretically reduce the search area.
After that, searchers do “reflex tasks,” which Fuell said basically means they are going to do a quick search of all the obvious places.
If that doesn’t produce a result, area searches are started.
“We start looking at putting together teams of assets, whether they are human searchers or different kinds of dogs or whatever, into segmented areas and ask them to thoroughly search those areas for the individual or clues,” he said.
Search teams employ a variety of search tactics throughout the areas that can include things like human detection dogs and infrared drones.
Search areas are decided, first and foremost, by any direct evidence they have that says it might be a good area to be looking, as well as following any trails, routes, roads, drainage, or other “ways to civilization” a lost person might travel.
Fuell said it used to be well-known that if you are lost, you should stay put or head downhill following waterways, but recently they have seen people attempting to go higher in an attempt to reach cell service.
Individuals interested in volunteering for searches with MARG or learning more about what they do, can find information at wvmarg.org
Fuell said volunteers are always welcome, but they ask individuals to sign up with a SAR — independent, unguided individuals could unintentionally miss or disturb clues in the area.
