THE HUNT FOR JARYD:
Remembering the search for a missing boy
FORT COLLINS» Allyn Atadero emerged from the closet of a basement bedroom decked out in a Poudre River Resort theme, a nod to the place he once owned that now harbors happiness and immense heartache.
Tears welled up as he pulled a toy tank, Oakland Raiders hat, Star Wars toy and the top of his son’s skull from a white cardboard box.
“I know it seems weird and some people might not understand, but this is all I have of him,” said Allyn, now 61, as he pulled the skull fragment from a clear plastic bag. “It’s sad, kind of surreal, to think that this is my son.”
Twenty years ago, Allyn Atadero experienced a parent’s worst fear when his 3-year-old son, Jaryd, went missing while hiking with a group on the Big South Trail in the Roosevelt National Forest, 60 miles west of Fort Collins.
The perplexing events surrounding Jaryd’s disappearance on Oct. 2, 1999, set off one of the largest search-and-rescue missions in Larimer County history. The case garnered national and international headlines that created a cult-like following of a mystery that has haunted Allyn for much of the past 20 years.
Adding to the case’s intrigue was the crash of a search helicopter, disappearance theories ranging from a mountain lion attack to abduction to drowning in the Big South River — each with its own holes — and a slew of reported sightings of Jaryd from around the country.
Then, on June 4, 2003, two hikers from Fort Collins stumbled upon what 200-plus trained searchers, a water dive team, a dozen dog teams, professional trackers and a search plane couldn’t — Jaryd Atadero, or what remained of him.
“I tell people Jaryd is kind of like having a pebble in your shoe,” Allyn said during an interview at his home in Parker earlier this May. “You know it’s there; every time you take a step you feel it. You can’t do anything about it, but it’s not enough to stop you from doing what you need to do every day. That’s Jaryd.
“He’s my little pebble.”
“They lost my baby, they lost my baby”
Saturday, Oct. 2, 1999, was one of those gorgeous fall bluebird days in the mountains of Colorado, and Allyn Atadero and his children, Jaryd and 6-year-old Josallyn, were in the heart of the beauty at the Poudre River Resort owned by Allyn and his twin brother, Arlyn.
The kids were anxious to go on an excursion to the nearby state fish hatchery with members of the Christian Singles Network group, of which Allyn, who was divorced from the children’s mother, was a member.
Allyn was reluctant for Jaryd to go, but when the group said they would only be going to the hatchery, he consented. But from there, the 11 members of the Christian group plus Josallyn and Jaryd decided to take an early afternoon hike up the Big South Trail, 15 miles west of the resort.
Though reports vary on what happened next, it is generally believed the group split into fasterand slower-paced groups on the 11-mile trail, located at 8,440 feet in the rugged Comanche Peak Wilderness and that eventually crosses into Rocky Mountain National Park.
About 1½ miles up the trail, Jaryd ran ahead of the group he was with and talked to two fishermen, who didn’t think much about Jaryd being alone since they told investigators they saw a group about 50 to 80 feet down the trail, according to a Larimer County Search and Rescue report. The last the fishermen saw of Jaryd, he was walking rapidly up the trail adjacent to the “Camp 2” sign, indicating the second of 16 backcountry campsites along the trail.
It is unclear if Jaryd was between the two groups or ahead of the faster group when he met the fishermen, who are believed to be the last to see Jaryd before he disappeared.
Some members of the 11-person hiking party reported hearing a scream, according to the investigation report. Josallyn told Allyn she did, too.
“I asked her, ‘What kind of scream was it?’; like somebody getting attacked or somebody playing with someone,” he said. “She said it sounded like a playful scream, like someone was going up to tag him.”
After realizing Jaryd was missing and searching for him for about an hour, two members of the group returned to the resort to tell Allyn.
“They said, ‘you need to sit down, something happened to Jaryd,’ ” Allyn recalled. “I asked them, ‘What happened to Jaryd?’ — thinking he fell down and got hurt. They said, ‘He’s OK, we just can’t find him.’ ”
Allyn jumped in his vehicle and drove to the trailhead, screaming, “They lost my baby, they lost my baby,” and “beating my chest all the way up there.”
He ran up the trail but quickly discovered he wasn’t going to find Jaryd by himself. By the time Allyn returned to the trailhead to have his resort manager call the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office, the manager already had.
A sheriff’s deputy and a Larimer County Search and Rescue member arrived, followed by more of each.
Josallyn, who is now married and lives in Fort Wayne, Ind., said she doesn’t have many vivid memories of the events but does remember her father returning from the trail without Jaryd.
“One of those memories was at the resort and hugging my dad, who was kneeling or squatting and crying and then wrapping my arms around him because I realized how serious this was,” she said.
Bill Nelson, now a recently retired undersheriff with the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office, was in charge of the search for Jaryd. When searchers arrived, it appeared to be just another mission, he said in a recent interview.
“Absolutely, I thought we would find him,” he said. “Yes, it was a young child, but my thought was we should be able to get in there with our people and do what we do and what we have done hundreds of times: find the person. It might take a few hours to find the child crying or hiding someplace nearby, but we would be done before midnight.”
Nelson said he went to his vehicle to nap just before midnight and told his staff to wake him when they found the boy. When he awoke the next morning in the front seat of his pickup, he became concerned.
The search for Jaryd hadn’t gone as planned. Nor would it.
Helicopter down
Sunday morning, Allyn and Josallyn heard the “whop, whop, whop” of a search helicopter making its way up the canyon.
“I remember saying to Josallyn, ‘Look, there’s the helicopter, they are going to find your brother,’ and we watched it fly over us,” Allyn said.
Instead of searching for Jaryd on that flight, the Huey UH-1N helicopter from F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyo., flew to what was then the Fort Collins-loveland Municipal Airport to refuel.
When the helicopter returned, it struggled with the fuel load and mountain conditions and stalled out, falling 100 feet and crashing up the Big South Trail. Aboard were four members of the Air Force and Mark Sheets, a Loveland resident and Larimer County Search and Rescue member.
Sheets wasn’t supposed to be on the flight but had relieved his manager, George Janson, from his shift. Janson suggested Sheets fly with the crew to help the team make ground search plans.
Sheets, 57, who retired from Larimer County Search and Rescue in 2017 after 30 years, remembers the moment before impact.
“I said on the intercom that we needed altitude now and (remember) the co-pilot saying, ‘I know but I can’t. We are going in,’ ” he said. “To me that was code for brace for impact.”
Sheets was the only crew member not in a seat — he was on the floor with the door open. He saw the rotors hit the tops of trees and pieces of helicopter spray into the forest. He tried to shut the door, but a severed tree limb came through and struck the Air Force doctor on board, fracturing the doctor’s eye socket.
Sheets said the helicopter continued to disintegrate — the fuselage split into three pieces — as it crashed across the trail. The jet engines, still operational, would roar for hours until the fuel ran out.
The Air Force crew was able to get out of the helicopter, Sheets said, but he was trapped. Nearby search and rescue members ran to the downed helicopter, kicked in a window and managed to pull the unconscious Sheets out.
Current Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith was a sergeant with the department during the search, for which he was the public information officer.
He said the crash added to the stress of a search that only grew more frustrating as the national media took notice.
TV trucks and newspaper reporters began to swarm the remote site after the grand jury in another chilling child case — the death of Jonbenét Ramsay in Boulder — postponed its announcement of whether it would hand down indictments.
TV satellite trucks — 17 at one time — lined up along Colorado 14 with “anchors in fur coats walking around and anybody and everybody calling us for information,” Smith said.
The disappearance of Jaryd Atadero had become an international spectacle.
As the search stretched into the third day, searchers combed river banks and up steep slopes. Dive teams peered into small pools left in the narrow, slow-moving river. A plane made passes overhead.
With every intense hour that searchers came up empty, the crush of questions squeezed law enforcement and searchers even harder.
Well-meaning but ill-equipped people were increasingly hounding the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office and Larimer County Search and Rescue to allow them to help.
Psychics professed to know where searchers could find Jaryd. A barefooted man with a mule showed up at the search site, ready to track him down. An American Indian came to perform a ritual, asking the mountain to give up the boy.
Theories as to what happened to Jaryd were expanding from rational possibilities — killed by a predator, fell behind boulders and died, drowned in the river — to the less plausible, but still possible, theory of abduction, to strange conspiracy theories.
A variety of people were voicing those theories to a vulnerable Allyn and his family, creating growing tension between the family and searchers.
“It became a tornado, hurricane, biggest storm in all of our lives,” Allyn said. “I was critical of them at the time because when you are in a survival situation, you want everything that can be done to be done, and at times I thought there was so much more they could have done.”
“If he’s not alive, God has him”
“There were people who wanted to point to the abduction conspiracy theory but nothing ever fell in line with it,” Smith said. “How could you capture this kid in the woods in this short time frame and then have gotten out without anybody seeing you? It just wasn’t probable.”
There is only one easy way out of the narrow canyon — back down the trail. On the day of Jaryd’s disappearance, one of the first searchers quickly hiked up to where snow covered the trail and saw no tracks. Hiking out either side of the narrow canyon would require a climb of 1,000 to nearly 2,000 vertical feet through thick trees and downed logs on a 45-degree slope.
As the search continued with no signs of Jaryd, the mountain lion attack theory became officials’ prevailing thought. There were mountain lion prints found in the area but nothing conclusive to indicate Jaryd might have been killed along the trail.
Wildlife experts said it wouldn’t take much for a mountain lion to carry a 3-year-old boy off the trail.
With Jaryd’s trail growing colder, the sheriff’s office met with Allyn and his family and made the difficult decision to call off the official search after a week. Others were allowed to continue the search on their own.
“I remember that Saturday after they called off the search going to Jaryd’s closet and putting away his dirty clothes and picking up the tank and toy soldiers from the bathtub where, the day before he went missing, he took a bath,” Allyn said. “I realized then I would never see him again. I had his toys but I didn’t have my baby.”
Clothing is found
On June 4, 2003, Fort Collins businessmen and hiking partners Gary Watts and Rob Osborne were hiking off-trail in the Big South Trail area when they stumbled upon a white Tarzan tennis shoe in a talus slope 500 vertical feet above the trail.
Then they found the other shoe, a brown fleece jacket and blue sweatpants turned inside out. One pant leg was mostly scattered by birds using the material in their nests.
Watts and Osborne knew instantly who they had discovered.
“The thing is, we were up there a week earlier and talked quite a bit about the various scenarios about his disappearance,” said Osborne, owner of Avogadro’s Number restaurant and bar in Fort Collins. “Then we happened upon the clothes, and it’s mystery solved.
“Once we saw the clothes, I knew exactly what happened to him; a mountain lion killed him. We felt that finding the items would hopefully bring some closure to the family.”
The next day, it took searchers about an hour to reach the site near Campsite 2, where they found the remaining clothing scattered across a 25-foot area. Some of the items were sheltered from the elements and some were exposed.
While the cloth jacket had what appeared to be puncture marks and the pants were tattered, the nylon shoes had little weathering. Eleven days later — just before Father’s Day — searchers found a molar and skull.
Initial DNA tests found an 86 percent chance the remains were Jaryd, Allyn said. It wasn’t until a decade later that new DNA technology proved 100 percent they were Jaryd’s remains.
According to Larimer County Search and Rescue’s report, searchers on foot had never made it up to the 9,120 foot elevation where Jaryd’s skull and tooth were found.
The Air Force helicopter would have likely searched the area had it not crashed.