The rare story made headlines in the local press.
Oswalt Connerjack, an autistic teenager who went missing two and a half years ago in California has been found safe and sound by police at a gas station in neighboring Utah, NBC News reported.
Connerjack Oswalt was reported missing by the Clearlake Police Department on September 29, 2019 with his last known sighting in nearby Willows, California roughly one week later.https://t.co/DD7g3P2EaN
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The 16-year-old disappeared exactly on September 28, 2019 in the Californian town of Clearlake.
The police had launched a search the following days, in vain.
"This is beyond anything we could have imagined," Lt. Andrew Wright of the Summit County, Utah, Sheriff's Office, where he was found, said Friday.
“This is a truly miraculous discovery.
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According to NBC, it had been several days since the police had contacted the teenager who was obviously sleeping outside in extremely low temperatures in this mountainous region, offering to take him to a shelter.
But he would have each time refused to give his name.
On April 9, they were called again by someone reporting the presence of the frozen teenager near the gas station.
They then offered to warm him up in their car and that's where they would have taken his fingerprints.
In a CBS News report, the young man can be seen via the camera of one of the police officers.
After coming across a poster of Oswalt in the National Center for Missing Children's database, they contacted Clearlake police and the autistic youngster's parents who immediately flew to Utah.
Details on how long Oswalt, now 18, was in Utah or how he got there remain unclear at this time.