Family members of missing Englishman Bryn Hargreaves, who was living in the Morgantown area, disclosed via social media on Sunday that the human remains found last month in a wooded area off of South Pierpont Road in Monongalia County were confirmed to belong to the former professional rugby player.
Bryn’s older brother, Gareth Hargreaves, posted the news on Facebook writing, “RIP Bryn Hargreaves. With incredible sadness I can confirm after 14 months we have finally found Bryn.”
His mother, Maria Andrews, also made a brief statement on the social media site saying, “Not something I wanted to be sharing. I’m in bits #heartbroken. My beautiful son Bryn, I can’t think of any words to describe the pain xx.”
Following the family’s announcement, the Monongalia County Sheriff’s Department released a statement Monday confirming the identity of the remains that were found by local shed hunters looking for deer antlers on Feb. 26, not far from Whisper Creek Apartments where Hargreaves was last seen.
He had last communicated with friends and family around Jan. 3, 2022, and was reported missing Jan. 16, 2022.
Despite multiple extensive searches of the area conducted by members of the sheriff’s department, Morgantown Police/Fire Search and Rescue, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Mountaineer Area Rescue Group (MARG), MECCA 911 and several individual volunteers, Hargreaves was not found.
Mon County Sheriff’s detective Sgt. Stephen Currie, who worked on Hargreaves’ case, said in cases like this where a missing person is believed to be on foot, away from their house, “typically we have to rely on other agencies that handle stuff like this, like fire departments or the Mountaineer Area Rescue Group, that are just more equipped to handle and more trained to handle those types of searches.
“With this one, we went with all of those and above,” Currie said. “We set up various searches on multiple days with volunteers. We set up searches in various water locations with the Morgantown fire and police search and rescue unit.”
Currie said Hargreaves’ remains were found in a densely wooded area that had some rugged terrain.
“There are valleys and ditches that go into that area and when you look at the weather and the time frame we were searching, it’s not unreasonable to think that the remains themselves could have been covered up by foliage or anything like that,” he said. “We did have people in that area searching, but unfortunately they just weren’t able to locate anybody when we searched.”
Lee Fuell, MARG secretary and deputy chief of operations, said there are basically four main factors that can play into the probability of finding a lost or missing person.
“The first one and perhaps the most important one is the elapsed time from the disappearance to the actual search operation,” Fuell said.
Time, he explained, gives a person who is ambulatory time to travel away from their last known location, making the search area larger as time goes on, which requires more searchers and resources. Some tactics, like trailing dogs or man trackers, are not as effective after the first day or so as scents disappear and footprints and other evidence of human passage is affected by the weather.
“Whether or not the subject wants to be found is a huge factor in the ability to find them,” Fuell said. “If they are actively evading or if they have autism or Alzheimer’s, or any other similar type of conditions, that may cause them to try to hide from searchers and it complicates the process.”
Fuell explained they also use drones with infrared sensors, that would pick up the difference in body temperature of a live person, but if a person is already deceased, the body become the same temperature as their surroundings and will not show up on infrared.
Time also gives a deceased body the opportunity to start decomposing, which could easily become camouflaged among the foliage.
“Decaying bodies will literally blend into the environment,” Fuell explained about the final phase of decomposition. “They become one with Mother Earth when they are out in woods; they just sort of settle into the ground.”
Scavengers, while maybe unpleasant to think about, can also scatter remains away from the original location.
“The more time that elapses between knowing that the person is missing and organizing and executing a large-scale search effort, the less chance that search effort is going to succeed,” he said.
Weather also plays a significant role in searches with dogs, which are commonly used by rescue groups.
“We know that temperature, humidity, sunlight and wind affect how well dogs can smell odors,” Fuell said. “If the scenting conditions are not just right, they might not detect it.”
He also said searchers are often briefed to not go into the woods thinking they are looking for a person, but going out to look for clues, because terrain, vegetation and even what the person is wearing, like earth tones, can really make the person camouflaged with the environment and will affect visual searching and physical access to some areas.
“There are places where the vegetation is so intense that you have to be down on your hands and knees to even penetrate into it. You just really hope the dogs can give you an indication that you need to go in there, which usually is very hard,” Fuell said.
The last factor is the probability of detection (POD), Fuell said, which is a multi-variable problem to determine the likelihood the subject is in the search area. The number of times an area is searched and different types or numbers of assets used are among the variables.
“We never expect 100% POD for any area searched; that would be sort of naive and unreasonable because there are too many factors that affect POD,” Fuell explained.
According to Fuell, newer research information indicates there is a greater chance of finding a subject with multiple searches of an area instead of a single, slow, high-searcher-density search, like a shoulder-to-shoulder sweep.
“We would never consider an area thoroughly searched if it was only searched once and probably not if it’s only been searched twice, but it does take a lot more man hours, which increases the personnel requirements and increases the time required to complete all the tasks that need to be completed in all the areas where the subject might be.”
Sheriff Perry Palmer said they are currently waiting on a completed autopsy report from the chief medical examiner before a cause of death can be determined, but they do not have reason to think his body was moved to the location and believe he was on foot in that area.
Palmer said he was thankful for all the support from other departments, organizations and individual people who took time to help in the searches.
Fuell said it can be emotionally stressful for the searchers when they are unable to come to a closure for a missing person and their family.
“Obviously we wish we had found Bryn. We put a lot of man hours into that, following up on suggestions from the family and some other things, too,” he said. “It’s a very heartbreaking case that affected, I think, everybody on our team and the other teams that helped us a lot. We talk about it from time to time over the last year and ask where could he be and what could we have done different?”
