Earlier this month, the Malheur Enterprise reported that the remains of a 27-year-old Idaho woman had been found in a remote area of Malheur County. Last June, the woman, Gwen Brunelle, told her family she was driving from Boise on a brief trip to California. Her car was found abandoned days later on a gravel pullout less than 30 miles west of the Idaho border.
The breakthrough in the case came with the involvement of Aloft Drone Search, a nonprofit in Sherwood that uses aerial and underwater drones to search for missing people. Its founder, John Jones, was contacted by Brunelle’s father in March to help find her. Before Jones traveled to southeastern Oregon, he and his team of volunteers began reviewing more than 13,000 images that were previously taken by an Idaho drone company that had also assisted with the search. Last month, Jones alerted the Malheur County Sheriff of something a volunteer had found in one of the drone images that led to the positive identification of Brunelle’s remains.
Jones joins us to talk about the discovery, and the role drone technology can play in locating missing people.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to a volunteer-led effort to search for missing people. John Jones founded the Sherwood-based nonprofit Aloft Drone Search a few years ago; he uses aerial and underwater drones to take pictures of places that would otherwise be really hard to get to. Then, volunteers scour those photos for any evidence of human life, or perhaps human remains. As reported recently by the Malheur Enterprise, his team recently helped authorities find the body of an Idaho woman who’d been missing for nearly a year. John Jones joins me now. It’s good to have you on the show.
John Jones: Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.
Miller: I want to start with that recent story of an Idaho woman named Gwen Brunelle, who your team helped find. What can you tell us about her initial disappearance?
Jones: Her initial disappearance, she was from Idaho, and she decided that she was going to go on a road trip to California. She showed bunnies, she was a rabbit shower, so she went on a road trip and never got to her destination. [Her] family never heard from her again. They dug into everything and found some gas station video footage, and it started the search from there.
Miller: There was an exhaustive search before your team was eventually contacted, including somebody who also had a drone who took thousands of photos. How is it that you were contacted?
Jones: We actually didn’t even know about this case. It was never brought to our attention, and the media around here didn’t really cover it. We were actually contacted in March of this year by the family and asked if we could come out and help.
Miller: And what did you do?
Jones: We agreed, but we also agreed that let’s wait until the snow and the mud’s gone in that area. In the meantime, I said, “Hey, if you hired a company to drone search already and they’ve got thousands of images, we have a team of image viewers. Why don’t you send those over to us? And in the meantime, while we’re waiting for the weather to get better, let’s review them.” I mean, this is what we do.
Miller: It’s interesting – the drone is in the name of your nonprofit and it does seem sort of so tech-based, but it seems like so much of the work that’s entailed here … and in the end, it was one of your volunteers who saw some evidence of human remains, and that’s what made the difference in terms of the recovery of the body. That work seems just so analog, in a sense, so painstaking, just having one human look at picture after picture.
Jones: It is.
Miller: What is that work like, emotionally?
Jones: It’s hard, because we know we’re looking for remains of somebody. We’re not looking for anybody that’s alive at this point. It’s also very exciting and it’s really rewarding.
Miller: I mean, is it also very boring at times? It seems like mostly boredom combined with sometimes either excitement or sadness.
Jones: It actually can be very, extremely boring. I personally don’t do it, because I don’t have the patience for it. It can be very boring, yes.
Miller: In a case like this, is it a member of your team that reaches out to the Brunelle family, or is that somebody else?
Jones: We didn’t reach out to them at all, but they personally reached out to us as well.
Miller: But I mean after. When a member of your team says, “I think we may have found something.” Do you then call the family and pass that information on?
Jones: We don’t. We pass it directly to law enforcement and let them take care of that.
Miller: And verify on the ground if it is a body.
Jones: Exactly, because we don’t want to say, “Hey, we think we found something,” and they go out and look, and it’s not human remains. It keeps their hopes up. We let law enforcement take it from there.
Miller: Let’s take a step back. How did you decide to start this nonprofit?
Jones: Yeah. A lot of people think I’m crazy for doing it and I probably am, but I’ve always been into remote control airplanes as a kid. Anything that flies, I’m just fascinated about it. I actually have a commercial pilot’s license, certificate I should say, and I just love airplanes and anything that flies. Once drones became a thing, I got into drones. And I’ve always been into search and rescue as well but I’ve never been able to commit, because as a kid I played sports. In high school, I had sports and then family and all that fun stuff.
I got into it. I had drones and I kind of got bored flying drones. I’m like, “Well, what am I flying around for?” Just looking at the ground, you know, and I’m like, “I could do something about this.” Finally, there was a missing person close to home in the Tualatin area, so I’m like, “I’m going to go out and just look,” and I didn’t tell the family or anything, because I have a drone that’s capable of looking. That’s how it all started, and once I was out there doing this, I’m like, “I just covered all this land in like 20 minutes. This is crazy. I could do something with this.”
Miller: You were doing something that you loved, but in a way that felt more productive than just the pure, aimless flying around of it.
Jones: Right. Yeah, it gave me a purpose to use the drone even more and just go, “Wow, OK, doing it with a purpose is so much more satisfying and rewarding.”
Miller: What was that first search like for you? As you said, you hadn’t even told the family what you were doing. What was it like?
Jones: I honestly didn’t really know what I was doing that much. That particular case, we didn’t really even have a last known position with the missing person, so it was just kind of like, “Well, he was maybe at this gas station so I’m going to look in fields around here,” and whatnot. His car wasn’t found at the time and everything. I was shooting in the dark and just learning as I go with that case.
Miller: Was there a first case that really felt like the true “first” one for you in a more thought out way?
Jones: Yes, and I don’t remember which one it was. They all are, because every time I go, I learn something new. And I think that’ll always be the case because everything’s so different. There’s some searches, especially the first one we found, that we got into and it worked. We found this person and I said, “Wow, this process actually works.”
Miller: What made that one work?
Jones: Just the way we grid search everything. We cover 100% of the ground that we fly, and then having image viewers look at the images, that whole process, which is a huge process. It can take a long time to image view. When I realized that, while this does work, I realized, “OK, I have something here that can actually benefit everybody.”
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of the images that you create in that search? Grid search, meaning every how many seconds you’re taking a picture of how big a place?
Jones: We break things up into quadrants of grid areas. It could be 200 acres to maybe 800 acres per quadrant. The drone will fly at about 33 miles an hour while it’s doing this and it’ll take a picture about every second, so we know we’re getting overlap on these images. We do the images and not video because of the images. It’ll do 4K video, but it’s not as clear as the images that it takes, so the images are much better to do.
Miller: And then you send it to your volunteers. How have you found volunteers?
Jones: There’s another nonprofit organization that I’ve been involved with in the past, and which I’m actually just a pilot for. We keep stuff separate. It’s the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation. They do just hikers, they’re specific for hikers, so they sometimes send me cases that they aren’t really going to do.
Miller: The volunteers, I’m wondering about the people. You said you don’t have the patience to actually go through those photos. You like taking the photos, it seems, not looking at them.
Jones: Yeah, exactly. I like going out.
Miller: So who’s looking at them?
Jones: A couple of the volunteers from the Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation volunteered for us as well, so they volunteer for both foundations. They came over then. Really, once we were in the media for their first search that we were successful at, we had a volunteer form submission on our website and it’s blown up. People just come from all over the place.
Miller: It seems like, especially if you’re looking for people who maybe have been missing for a year or so, the likely best case scenario is that you’re going to help a grieving family find out what happened to their loved one, as opposed to finding a living person. How do you deal with the emotional weight of this work?
Jones: I guess you just have to compartmentalize it, a little bit. It’s very emotional. The person who found Gwen, that was her first find and she was very emotional about it, which is understandable. It is very emotional and you just kind of have to take it in stride, but you have to also realize that you just helped a family give answers and find their missing loved one, who they can finally put to rest. So it’s a very good feeling as well.
Miller: Equipment costs money, to charge these things. You’re spending a lot of volunteer hours as well. How is all this paid for?
Jones: Well, a lot of it was my personal money to get started. I spent tens of thousands of dollars on equipment and whatnot, and I have told myself I have to stop doing that or I’m going to go broke. Everything else, we are 100% free. We don’t charge law enforcement or families, so we rely on donations.
Miller: How would you describe your relationship with law enforcement?
Jones: I am very pro law enforcement, I would love to help them in every way I can. We have some barriers in the Portland area; they don’t seem to want our help. I know that it’s not just them not wanting it, but there’s a lot of legalities to it, like insurance and liability and whatnot. Outside of the Portland area, we’ve had really good relationships with people who just really are thankful and ask for us to help them out.
Miller: Do you have cases lined up right now? You’d said earlier that you were waiting in the Malheur case to actually go out yourselves until the snow melted. It’s spring now, a lot of the snow has melted. Not in the mountains yet, I suppose, but what’s next for you?
Jones: I actually might be flying out to Arizona next week to look for a missing person. There’s two cases. One’s not an Aloft Drone Search case, it’s a Fowler-O’Sullivan Foundation case, but since we work closely, I’m a pilot for them as well. There’s another one, since I’m gonna be out there, that’s really close; that will be an Aloft Drone Search case, and I’ll spend a day or two looking for that person as well. That’s in Arizona, probably next week. And then we have two in Washington that will be sometime in the summer.
Miller: John Jones, thank you very much.
Jones: Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.
Miller: John Jones is a drone pilot, and the founder and executive director of the Sherwood-based nonprofit Aloft Drone Search.
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