This story is Part 3 of a series
What actually happened to David O’Sullivan?
Two weeks into what was supposed to be a 2,650-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, the 25-year-old from Ireland made it to the Riverside County town of Idyllwild. He stopped for a couple of days to resupply, checked out of his hotel room the morning of April 7, 2017, and was never heard from again.
After that, there are three broad possibilities.
One: He died somewhere in the San Jacinto Mountains north of Idyllwild.
Two: He died somewhere else.
Three: He’s alive, which would mean — unless you believe in sci-fi or soap opera plots — he disappeared on purpose.
“Oh God no,” his mother, Carmel O’Sullivan, said about the third possibility. “99.9% of my heart says no. … He wouldn’t have been so cruel to do that to us.”
A team of volunteer searchers who haven’t given up hope of finding answers are focused on the first option. But they face some formidable challenges.
No one knows which of the many possible routes he planned to take from Idyllwild back to the Pacific Crest Trail or how far he may have gotten.
“If we only had one haystack, we’d eventually be able to find the needle, but we have half a dozen different haystacks,” said Jon King of Idyllwild, a prolific local hiker who’s helped searchers try to figure out the likeliest scenario.
The terrain where the group believes O’Sullivan is most likely to have met trouble is steep and thickly forested, and quickly becomes inaccessible when you get off trail. Drones would be the best way to search, but the area is designated as state wilderness, where drones aren’t allowed, and federal rules say pilots have to keep their drones in sight at all times, which wouldn’t be possible. Even if the group could get permission, the trees and boulders can obscure objects on the ground.
One dark possibility that his mother worries about is whether O’Sullivan could have gotten lost and wandered into an area where marijuana was being grown — a significant problem in California’s national forests. Some of the people searching for O’Sullivan wonder, even if he met a natural or accidental death, could someone else have found him first? If people involved in illicit activity found his remains, could they have disposed of them so as not to attract law enforcement’s attention?
If O’Sullivan’s remains are out there in the wilderness, the forces of nature — from rain, snow and sun to gravity and animals — have had four years to claim them. Every season that goes by makes the task harder, and 2020 was a lost year because of the pandemic.
Still, the volunteer team has some reason for optimism. In late 2019 and again in early 2021, they found the remains of two other people they searched for: Paul Miller, a Canadian who went missing in Joshua Tree National Park in summer 2018, and Rosario “Chata” Garcia, a local woman with dementia who disappeared in July 2020 after getting her car stuck on a rocky trail 40 miles from her home.
Western States Aerial Search, a nonprofit group of drone operators based in Utah, was able to fly over the areas around where Miller’s and Garcia’s cars were found — they got permission from the national park, and none was needed in the area where Garcia went missing. Volunteer image searchers then began scouring the photographs. In both cases, a Missouri man, Morgan Clements, was the one who first spotted bones.
After Miller was found, Carmel O’Sullivan said the success gave her hope. But while she’s happy for other families to get good news, she’s a little jealous too.
Not knowing what happened to her son, not being able to bring him home and bury him, is an ache that won’t go away. She still hasn’t been able to bring herself to give away his clothes and books.
“The passage of time — in one way, it does ease (the pain), but in another, I don’t think it ever will,” she said recently.
Her son’s 30th birthday is this August, and it’s hard for her to think that as she and her husband and David’s brother grow older, David never will.
The force behind the search
After seeing the struggles of the O’Sullivans and other families, Cathy Tarr, the woman leading the volunteer search effort, was inspired to start an organization to help. The Fowler O’Sullivan Foundation achieved nonprofit status in 2020 — a bright spot for Tarr in a year that included not just the pandemic but a breast cancer diagnosis.
The foundation will use what Tarr and her team have learned to become a resource for families of people who have gone missing in wilderness situations, especially once the official search-and-rescue efforts end.
“When that’s called off, that’s when families are lost,” Tarr said. “They don’t know what to do — how to read a map, how to look for clues, how to attract volunteers. It becomes random. We do it systematically.”
The foundation’s other focus will be proactive safety initiatives. Tarr said they gave away six rescue beacons to Pacific Crest Trail hikers this year and partnered with Nomad Ventures in Idyllwild to offer discounts on microspikes, which go on hikers’ shoes to give them better traction in the snow.
Cathy Tarr stands at the Devil’s Slide Trailhead in Idyllwild on Wednesday, May 12, 2021. She considers that trail the most likely route that David O’Sullivan would have taken from town back to the Pacific Crest Trail on the day he went missing. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Cathy Tarr sits near the Devil’s Slide Trailhead in Idyllwild on Wednesday, May 12, 2021. Tarr is leading volunteer search efforts for David O’Sullivan, a young man from Ireland who went missing in the Idyllwild area while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2017. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Cathy Tarr holds a rescue beacon similar to ones that a nonprofit group she founded last year, the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation, gave away to six Pacific Crest Trail hikers this year. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Cathy Tarr’s research into the David O’Sullivan case and other missing hikers has included research on how people are likely to behave when they get lost. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Cathy Tarr walks to towards the Devil’s Slide Trailhead in Humber Park Idyllwild on Wednesday, May 12, 2021. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)
Tarr’s involvement in O’Sullivan’s case began with unrelated events in two corners of the United States far from Southern California.
Tarr, now 58, had been planning to hike the Pacific Crest Trail herself in 2017, and had been in New Hampshire training for the snow. Two weeks before she was supposed to head out, she was in a car crash.
She couldn’t hike, but she heard about another PCT hiker named Kris Fowler who’d gone missing in late 2016 in a snowstorm in Washington, and she figured she could help. She traveled there for a four-day search and ended up staying six or eight weeks, she said. (Fowler — the other namesake of Tarr’s foundation — also has never been found, though volunteers and the local sheriff’s department continue to search and Tarr remains involved in those efforts, too.)
While she was in Washington, word of O’Sullivan’s disappearance began to spread north up the Pacific Crest Trail.
Tarr had previously lived in Southern California and her daughter still lives here. Tarr was planning to visit and found out that O’Sullivan’s parents were coming from Ireland at the same time, so she arranged to have lunch with them after they met with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.
“They were very unhappy with the meeting they had just had, so I said let’s do our own investigation,” Tarr said.
She was surprised by how little was being done to search for O’Sullivan compared to Fowler’s case. “I thought, ‘Woah, this is weird. Where are all the flyers? Who’s searching for him? What’s going on?’”
Tarr knows the heart-wrenching feeling of having a son go missing. A year or two before meeting the O’Sullivans, she got a call in the middle of the night that her own son hadn’t returned from a hike to the mountains.
“I know that initial shock that a family gets,” Tarr said. “I’ve felt it. I remember pacing back and forth … I remember calling the police. I remember how scared I was.”
Thankfully, her son was found safe in less than a day. But even now, she visibly tenses up talking about it.
“Once you experience that, it’s something you never forget,” she said.
That feeling is part of what has motivated her in the almost four years since she first met O’Sullivan’s parents.
“If it weren’t for her, there probably would be no search going on,” Carmel O’Sullivan said.
Solving the mystery
Over the past four years, Tarr and the team of volunteers she assembled have done extensive research to narrow down the possibilities of what could have happened to O’Sullivan.
Working backward through that list of three broad possibilities, they don’t believe he could still be alive.
Friends and family say O’Sullivan was as enthusiastic about the trip as he’d been about anything, and his messages from the trail showed someone who “had set himself a personal challenge and was enjoying the journey,” in his mother’s words.
Sgt. Sean Lawlor, a Murrieta police officer who first took O’Sullivan’s missing-person report, also did some investigating and doesn’t believe O’Sullivan survived. Knowing he was an inexperienced solo hiker and had a good family dynamic, he believes O’Sullivan probably got lost, maybe dehydrated or washed away by a river.
“I didn’t get any inkling of signs of foul play or that he would have run off,” Lawlor said.
Once word of O’Sullivan’s disappearance got out, his family received many tips from people who thought they saw him at points north of Idyllwild.
“He was even ‘found’ a few times, even to the point where we rang hostels to speak with ‘him’. None of these sightings were him,” Niall, his older brother, wrote in an online post in July 2017.
During the reporting of this story, someone Tarr’s volunteer team had never heard from before, despite all of their outreach, came forward on Facebook claiming to have seen O’Sullivan that summer in Kennedy Meadows, an area known as the PCT’s gateway to the Sierra. “I even joked with him and a few other hikers that he was the missing Irish dude. Guy basically told me to mind my business,” the commenter wrote.
Tarr believes sightings like those are cases of mistaken identity. She’s found at least three or four other hikers from that year who look very similar to O’Sullivan. The accent is what stood out to some people who thought they’d encountered the Irishman, but hikers came to the PCT from all over the world, including places with similar-sounding accents such as Scotland.
O’Sullivan had been stopping in towns and making financial transactions all the way to Idyllwild, but nowhere after that, including the next town where he would have needed to resupply, Big Bear, about five days up the trail from Idyllwild. Several thousand dollars were left sitting in his bank account. His Kindle was never turned on after April 5.
Why, Tarr reasons, would he have kept hiking without doing any of those things — let alone without contacting his family again. She’s convinced that he couldn’t have made it to Big Bear or else his family would have heard from him there.
While a hiker can run into trouble anywhere, everything that Tarr knows about the trail and the conditions that year tells her that O’Sullivan faced the highest risk on the trail just north of Idyllwild.
Heavy winter storms broke a five-year drought and covered the San Jacinto Mountains in snow that was still up to 3 feet deep when O’Sullivan was coming through. Multiple hikers reported trouble in the mountains, especially along a 5-mile stretch of the PCT that traverses Fuller Ridge. People were sliding downhill and enduring exhausting, injury-inducing battles to get back to the trail. Several hikers required rescue that spring.
When O’Sullivan set out, “He was very ill-prepared,” Tarr said. He hadn’t trained in the snow and, as far as anyone knows, didn’t have the proper equipment for safe snow hiking. He didn’t have a working phone, and his Kindle only connected over WiFi. He had paper maps but no GPS-equipped device, and no rescue beacon that he could have used to summon help in an emergency — something Tarr strongly recommends.
His last email to his parents indicated he was going to get a later start back to the trail the next morning because he had to stop at the post office again, so there may not have been anyone left behind him that day.
If he got hurt or lost, he would have been all alone out there.
Other PCT deaths
O’Sullivan wouldn’t have been the first Pacific Crest Trail hiker to die in the San Jacinto Mountains, and he wouldn’t have been the last.
In March 2020, 22-year-old Trevor Laher of Fort Worth, Texas, was killed when he fell about 600 feet into a ravine near Apache Peak, about 13 trail miles southeast of Idyllwild. The trails were snowy from a series of storms that had rolled through over the past week. Laher had been with two other PCT hikers he had befriended along the trail, and they were able to call for help with an emergency GPS device.
The risky mission to recover Laher’s body and rescue his two friends — winds were so strong that they grounded a helicopter, so searchers had to cut trail into the steep, hard snow slope to reach them — was one of several in just a two-day span. One PCT hiker slipped and fell in the ice and snow and had to take shelter under a rock through a snowstorm until rescuers could get to him the next day. Another fell 150 feet off the trail and also spent the night lost. Then two PCT hikers from France needed rescue when one fell about 60 feet off the side of the trail and the other got stuck in a section of ice.
Any of them could have ended up lost like O’Sullivan if just a few of fate’s dominoes had fallen a different way.
Then there’s the case of John Donovan.
The newly retired Virginia man came to hike the Pacific Crest Trail in 2005. He was last seen in the San Jacinto Mountains on May 3, headed toward Fuller Ridge as a storm moved in. Despite multiple searches, it was a year before his remains would be found by astonishing accident.
In May 2006, a young couple visiting from Dallas rode the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway into the San Jacinto Mountains. Brandon Day and Gina Allen hadn’t intended to go for much of a hike, but took a few wrong turns while looking at the scenery and ended up hopelessly lost.
In an essay for their hometown’s D Magazine, Day and Allen described spending the next two nights trying to fend off hypothermia and the days clawing their way through thick vegetation and sliding down rock faces in terrain so rugged, they wondered if any human had ever been there before.
They ended up following a creek to a canyon where not just any human, but Donovan himself, had been until he perished.
“We couldn’t walk our way out,” Day told The Press-Enterprise at the time. The canyon was too steep. “We were stuck.”
Day and Allen used some of Donovan’s matches to start a small fire that attracted rescuers; they credited him with saving their lives.
They also found some papers that Donovan scrawled notes on, chronicling his final days.
According to an in-depth story in Backpacker magazine, Donovan described in the makeshift journal how he couldn’t find the trail back to Idyllwild amid the blizzard conditions, so he tried heading toward the lights of Palm Springs below. He ended up in the canyon, injured and down to 12 crackers. He spent more than a week there, including his 60th birthday. In his last entry, dated 11 days after he got lost, he wrote: “Goodbye and love you all.”
“Nobody knew where he was, nobody knew to come looking for him, so he was preparing for the end,” Day told The Press-Enterprise. “We were looking at the words of a man who was passing.”
Assuming Tarr is right that O’Sullivan never made it out of the San Jacinto Mountains, which scenario befell him? A quick death like Laher’s? Or an ordeal more like Donovan’s?
Searchers will ‘never give up’
Since late 2017, Tarr and her team have conducted numerous ground and aerial searches north of Idyllwild. Always on the lookout for bright blue — the color of O’Sullivan’s backpack — Tarr jokes that they’ve become the mountain’s mylar balloon cleanup crew.
The Idyllwild area’s many hiking trails are well-used and have been searched thoroughly for signs of O’Sullivan. The group has been back out already this year, but Tarr is frustrated that the areas they have left to explore now are too dangerous to reach by foot.
“I feel right now we’re at a standstill, and that’s not where I want to be,” she said.
“I’ve always felt we could find him. Always. But, I don’t know … It’s the one case I have that I’ll never give up on,” she said.
Members of her team are equally committed.
“We will not stop,” said Gloria Boyd of Yucaipa, “because for me that’s the worst thing that could happen: Not only did the authorities walk away but the only people you have left who could potentially help walk away? I’m not going to stop. I don’t see an end in sight. If it’s 10 years it’s 10 years, but damn it we’re getting him back home.”
How to help
Anyone wishing to help the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation, whether by volunteering or donating, can go to www.fofound.org/joinourteam.
The O’Sullivan family asks that anyone who is hiking in the Idyllwild area and spots something potentially of interest leaves it where it is and emails information to helpfinddavido@gmail.com.
Hiker safety
Here are some of the Pacific Crest Trail Association’s safety tips, which are good advice for hikers on any trail.
- There is intrinsic risk in the wilderness, and you are responsible for your own safety. Be prepared, and learn first aid.
- Let someone know your plans. If you’re on a day hike, tell someone where you’re going and when you expect to return. Long-distance hikers, leave a copy of your itinerary with someone, check in regularly, let them know when you’ll check in next and have a plan for what they’ll do if you don’t.
- Be mentally prepared for the risks you may encounter. Think through scenarios ahead of time and decide how you might respond.
- Travel within your skill level.
- Always carry current maps and know how to use them.
- Cellphones and rescue beacons can save lives in emergencies — but they don’t guarantee your safety. Rely on your own skills and intuition, not on your technology.
- Use extra caution if hiking alone.
- Be wary of people who make you uneasy.
- Stay on the trail. The moment you leave, you’re in the wilderness. If something goes wrong, you may never be found.