Family of woman missing in Japan says new team joining search
Pattie Wu-Murad of Storrs has been missing for almost three weeks in a mountainous region of Japan where she was hiking, and her husband, son and daughter are still there searching for her, along with American and Japanese search-and-rescue teams and the local police.
“Every day she’s out there, you’re hoping for more of a miracle,” her husband, Kirk Murad, said Wednesday from Japan. “We’re not going to give up on her. I just hope she has a place where she can stay warm. It gets in the 40s here. We had a lot of rain today.”
Wu-Murad, 60, is an experienced hiker who went missing after setting out for a hike the morning of April 10. There is video footage of her arriving at the guesthouse April 9, where she spent the night, and photos of her at the guesthouse that night, Murad said. Murad said the police took a statement from the innkeeper, who said that he walked Wu-Murad out of the guesthouse and pointed her toward the trailhead.
Murad, a longtime educator and coach from Storrs, found out on April 14 that his wife was missing when he got a call from the U.S. Embassy. Their daughter Murphy, who lives in Singapore, arrived in Japan April 16 after starting a GoFundMe page that has raised over $165,000 to help fund a search-and-rescue mission to find her mother. Kirk arrived April 17 and his son Bryce April 18.
They’ve been looking for her ever since, along with their searchand-rescue teams and the local police. The U.S. Embassy and the FBI have also been involved, Murad said, and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal has been helpful, keeping in touch with the family and authorities in Japan.
Pattie and Kirk have been married for 33 years and have three children. Wu-Murad, who recently retired, has hiked in Spain, France, Egypt and Jordan. She had been in Japan since March 5 when she visited a friend in Tokyo and did some other trekking, including part of the 88-Temple Walk on the island of Shikoku before setting out to hike Kumano Kodo, an ancient pilgrimage trail in the mountains of Wakayama.
Search-and-rescue teams, both from the U.S. and Japan, have searched the entire trail, as well as places where Wu-Murad could have fallen, and police have had helicopters out searching. Many of the search-and-rescue volunteers left last week, but there is a new group of search-and-rescue workers — high-angle rope experts who will be able to look further down the mountain off the trail — arriving this weekend.
“Some of these canyons are so, so deep,” Murad said. “This is some of the roughest terrain these guys have seen, which doesn’t give us a lot of comfort. If they can go down 1,000 feet, maybe they can get a better view of what’s down there.”
Murad said the police have opened an investigation into possible foul play as well.
Murphy Murad, Kirk and Pattie’s daughter, has been serving as the point person for the searchand-rescue mission, which has been very difficult for her, Murad said.
“She is the liaison between all these parties: the American consulate & embassy in Japan, DC, private SAR teams, volunteers, cell carriers, the police, translators, accommodation, transportation, our family on the ground and back home,” her brother Bryce wrote on the GoFundMe page. “All while trying to keep regular updates with social media, press and gofundme (all of our finances).
“Somehow, my sister Murphy (a 27 y.o. Basketball coach) has been tasked with running the whole search and rescue operation on the ground; when clearly, she (nor any of us) are experts in SAR. She has become the de facto point-person for the entire operation. With her living in Singapore, she was in a similar time zone as my mother and the first person to touch down in Japan. Meaning all information was fed through her for the crucial first days of the missing persons case. Now, we have government officials telling her she is the point person on this case because she handled herself so well in those first few days. This is criminally insane.”
Murad said the search-and-rescue teams told him they would write some procedures up for the future.
“This is something I’ll push later, but I don’t want any other family to go through this,” he said. “This is crazy.”