San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
FAMILIES
snow-covered trail and fell to his death.
After nearly six months of wondering where her husband’s body lay, Sturkie said she and their four children felt a strange sense of relief when she got the call from the Riverside Sheriff’s Department that June morning.
“I know it sounds weird that we were happy that we could finally have a funeral, but it was so agonizing not knowing,” she said. “Being able to bring him home and bury him brought an immense amount of peace to our family.”
Now Sturkie is working to bring relief to others families gripped with the same agonizing uncertainty. She’s now an officer for the Fowler O’sullivan Foundation (FOF), a Menifee organization dedicated to helping families search for loved ones who have gone missing while hiking. The foundation, which was started in 2017 and incorporated as a nonprofit last year, is named for two long-missing Pacific Crest Trail hikers: Kris Fowler, who disappeared in Washington state in October 2016, and Daniel O’sullivan, who was last seen near Idyllwild in April 2017.
The all-volunteer organization’s mission is to step in to aid families when police, sheriff ’s and other agencies’ search efforts have concluded. Just last month, FOF members helped find the body of 73-year-old Rosaria Garcia of Hemet. After seven months of fruitless searching by authorities and Garcia’s family, FOF members studying thousands of aerial drone images spotted her remains just 500 feet away from where she’d parked her car near Lake Hemet. Garcia was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and family members believe she got lost while running errands and wandered away from her car.
Sturkie serves as treasurer for FOF and she helps with logistics and search crew support and as a liaison for the families of lost hikers. She also traveled to Washington state last August to join a group in a fresh search for Fowler’s remains. She said she likes being in the company of these selfless volunteers and she finds it fulfilling to help other families in pain.
“The people that we’re working with all have such good hearts and they’re so generous,” Sturkie said. “It just feels good to help people. It gives my life a much deeper meaning. This work transcends the everyday things. We want to make sure that people have the answers they’re looking for.”
Sturkie got involved with FOF through its executive director Cathy Tarr, an avid hiker who has dedicated her time to search and recovery efforts ever since joining a search for Fowler in Washington in 2017. Sturkie and Tarr met by chance in Idyllwild in March 2019. Sturkie was in the area to search for her husband, and Tarr was looking for O’sullivan.
Tarr said that when they first met, Sturkie was like many of the family members she meets in these situations — stressed and unprepared for the rigors of search and recovery.
“She needed help, she needed someone to guide her, she didn’t have the right equipment, she couldn’t read a map, and she didn’t know how to search safely,” Tarr said. “But she was willing to put in the time, and she said she could get a group together to do a search, and she did.”
On weekends over the next few months, the two women bonded as they met regularly in the mountain to visit the area where John’s truck was abandoned and organize search parties from the Sturkie family’s church and large circle of friends. Together, they fixed pitted dirt roads so searchers could drive to the staging area, they shared sandwiches while buzzards circled overhead, and, occasionally, they butted heads. Tarr insisted that the Sturkies stay at the base camp as support crew rather than join the search, a rule they disagreed with but followed. Tarr said families desperately want to find their loved one’s remains to end their pain, but seeing the sometimes-decomposing bodies can be a scarring experience.
“It’s a hard place to be emotionally when you don’t have the body,” Tarr said. “It’s called ambiguous loss when you’re stuck in time. You can’t move forward. You have a loved one missing and there’s a big hole in the family.”
Sturkie said she has come a long way from those dark days in 2019 before her husband’s body was found. Back then she was working full time at the Omni La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, trying to organize searches on the weekends, supporting the emotional needs of her four children, who now range in age from 17 to 30, and juggling mounting bills following the loss of her husband’s salary as a journeyman electrician. Friends launched a Gofundme campaign for the family that raised nearly $30,000, and once John’s remains were identified, his life insurance policy provided them with more financial stability. John Sturkie is now buried at Holy Sepulchur Cemetery in Orange, where the Sturkies lived before moving to Oceanside in 2000.
“We’re so grateful for the many people who came out for the funeral,” she said. “The amount of support from everybody was such a comfort, and my kids were just so overwhelmed.”
Since the pandemic began, Sturkie has been on furlough from her hospitality job. This has given her more time to help with FOF. The organization has just seven members. Most are experienced hikers with experience in search, rescue and recovery. One of them, Morgan Clements, is a database manager who runs websites on missing hiker search operations and global threats, one is a former National Park Service ranger, and one is a psychic detective.
The team provides their services free to families and works closely with two charity groups run by professional drone pilots who donate their services to digitally map search and recovery areas: Western States Aerial Search in Utah and Wings of Mercy in Canada. FOF’S Clements heads up the team that searches the drone-shot photographs. It’s slow, painstaking work but in December 2019, he was able to spot in one drone photo the bones of Paul Miller, a 51year-old Canadian hiker who went missing during a solo trail walk in Joshua Tree National Park in July 2018.
Sturkie said FOF will do ground searches when warranted, but there has been too much snow and ice on the ground to do any effective searching so far this year. The group also raises money to purchase safety equipment for hikers, like satellitelinked transmitters that work better than cellphones in remote areas and hiking shoes with built-in traction gear for hiking in icy conditions. FOF also aims to raise awareness about the dangers of hiking alone without proper gear and, finally, to be a resource to families when all other options run out.
Although the pandemic has been hard for most families, Sturkie said it has provided an unexpected bonus to her family, who all sheltered together last year until her second-youngest child left for college in the fall.
“Having a lot of time together for healing has been just such a gift,” said Sturkie, who said her family is doing well despite their loss. “It’s kind of surreal having him gone. He was such a big personality in our home. But we’re able to share a lot of the happy stories and we still talk about him. Just because someone has passed doesn’t mean they’re not part of your family.”
To learn more about FOF, visit fofound.org.