(NewsNation) — After Aidan Clune’s truck was found abandoned by a highway in Nevada, police tracked his footsteps into the mountains but that’s where the trail went cold. His mother has attempted to retrace her son’s steps in an attempt to find her missing son.
Amy Clune has searched for her son since he disappeared in 2022, retracing his steps and using high-tech tools to try to locate Aidan, never giving up on her search.
No one knows why Aidan took off, leaving his pickup truck on the side of a Nevada highway and running into the mountains. Amy said he was having a mental health crisis, but she’s never given up hope that he made it out of the mountains alive.
Aidan was 19 on Apr. 27, 2022, when his truck was found on the side of the road.
“They said that the passenger side door was open and his wallet, his clothes and belongings, his laptop were all sitting in the passenger seat,” Amy said.
In recordings, the highway patrol dispatcher can be heard saying Aidan’s name and noting that he’s missing, but there was no immediate search performed.
“All of the law enforcement that I talked to at that time, I told all of them he was having a mental breakdown,” Amy said. “He was having some kind of primary psychosis, he needed help.”
Amy, frustrated by the lack of action, remembers Aidan as a boy who liked to pose for the camera and show off his guitar talent on Instagram.
But at 19, Aidan was an adult, protected by privacy laws.
“I was beside myself, I just feel like I’m hitting my head on a brick wall, screaming at them to help me find my son,” Amy said.
Days after Aidan’s truck was found, the sheriff took Amy down the rutted, two-track road to see the vast search area.
Aidan’s distinctive sneaker prints had been tracked to a location 10 miles into the wilderness, at the north end of the Cherry Creek mountain range. But then snow ended the search.
Amy and her sister have made multiple trips from California, trying to trace Aiden’s steps.
His mom climbed to the last known coordinates and found a glimmer of hope.
“When I turned around on the side of the mountain and looked around, what I saw directly north was the highway,” Amy said. “My theory is at that point, he did not go southwest, he went north, northeast where he could see the road.”
On another trip, the women found shoe prints to support their theory.
“They’re peanut-shaped, which means they’re tennis shoes and they are embedded into the ground which means they were made during the wet season,” Amy explained. “That was the first time we actually thought he might have made it out of the range.”
Bill Dohse, founder of Find 911, used search dogs to confirm Aidan’s path. He agrees there is a possibility that Aidan made it out of the mountains.
“Our dog confirmed the two spots law enforcement located and then we continued on past that,” Dohse said.
Dohse’s team used high-tech drones and artificial intelligence to scour the area.
“We uploaded images of Aidan, the clothes we suspected he was wearing,” Dohse said. “The software, while running through Amazon’s AI server, will look for those things even if they’re under brush or partially covered by debris.”
But the technology found nothing belonging to Aidan.
A new trail led Amy to Salt Lake City, where a woman said she saw Aidan on the train and around the downtown area. “
“He’s always walking, looking like he doesn’t have a place to live,” Krista McNicol said.
As she passed the man on city transit, McNicol was able to take a quick but blurry image.
“I’m almost 100% sure it’s him,” she said.
Amy agreed that the photo could be Aidan.
“His hair in the photograph is consistent with Aidan’s hair, the jawline is definitely consistent,” she said.
In September, Amy and her sister went to Salt Lake City to visit homeless camps and show people photos of Aidan and his tattoos.
“A handful of people said they recognized Aidan’s poster,” Amy said.
Amy is now asking for any help locating the man in the picture.
“There is somebody in Salt Lake City who strongly resembles my son. We have to find that young man so we can rule it out,” Amy said. “Or it would be a miracle if it was him, it would be a miracle. And I would be ecstatic.”
Amy has enlisted the help of a video forensic company to try to determine if the photo from Utah could be Aidan. In the meantime, she’s sent Aidan’s photo to the Utah Transit Authority and groups that do homeless outreach in the area, in the hopes someone will recognize him.
