Police Locate Executive Who Had Vanished : Disappearance: Rowland Snowdon is found in a Las Vegas hotel after being missing nearly four months. He is back with his family, police say.

Rowland Snowdon, an aerospace executive who disappeared without a trace nearly four months ago, has been found in Las Vegas.

“He’s back in Orange County under the care of his doctors,” Snowdon’s 25-year-old son, Rick, said Thursday night.

Rick Snowdon declined to say what his father was being treated for or to provide any more details about how he was found.

According to a report in the Irvine World News, Snowdon, 48, of Huntington Beach, was found this week in a Las Vegas hotel room after police randomly checked car license plates in the hotel’s parking lot. After discovering Snowdon’s car, the report said, the police contacted the hotel’s management and found Snowdon in a hotel room.

Irvine Police Lt. Vic Thies said Thursday night that his department had been notified that Snowdon had been found but that they did not know the details.

“We know that he was found in Las Vegas and that his family evidently brought him back to California,” Thies said. “We have not interviewed him or talked to him.”

Police Chief Charles Brobeck said it is unlikely that Snowdon will be charged with any crimes.

“As long as he’s returned and is in good health, there’s no criminal violation,” Brobeck said. “Now that he’s returned, we will have to determine whether or not there is anything else to investigate.”

Thies said there was always a feeling in the department that Snowdon disappeared of his own accord.

“We did not have a lot of strong evidence that there was any foul play involved,” Thies said. “The feeling was that he probably took off.”

Still, Thies said the case remained a high priority and that Irvine Investigator Larry Montgomery had spent “hundreds and hundreds” of man-hours on it.

Montgomery “backtracked everywhere where Snowdon could have gone and worked with the family on all possible leads,” Thies said. “We got a lot of phone calls during the course of the investigation and got a lot of leads and tips. Some were valid and some were not.”

Brobeck said he felt compassion for Snowdon’s family.

“I’m sure there is a lot of shock, dismay and concern,” Brobeck said. “The fact is, when someone is missing, there’s always the possibility that they just dropped out of society--people do that and sometimes they are never found.”

Rick Snowdon said the family would have no comment on the matter until Monday.

“We’re in the middle of Christmas dinner,” he said. “We’ve made a decision to try and be left alone for the holidays, and that’s what we’d like to try to live with.”

Snowdon’s boss, Robert Rau, president of Parker-Hannifin Corp., would say only that he was happy that Snowdon was all right.

“If he’s alive and healthy that would be good news,” he said.

Snowdon was last seen on Sept. 1 at 9:30 a.m. at a Union Bank branch at 2001 Michelson Drive in Irvine near the John Wayne Airport. A business director with Parker-Hannifin, he was en route to a meeting at the company’s facility on Jamboree Road, a few miles away. Records and a videotape provided by the bank show that he had just made a $4,900 cash deposit.

Rick Snowdon had given him the cash several days earlier as repayment of a loan.

In the nearly four months since then, Snowdon’s family had exhausted the search for the missing executive. Among other thing, they circulated 25,000 flyers in English and Spanish and held a press conference publicizing the disappearance.

In addition, they spent hours searching for him by car and on foot, consistently rejecting the notion that he might have disappeared voluntarily.

“If he left on his own,” his wife, Cheryl Snowdon, said in September, “why would he make a large deposit in our joint account? Rod would never ever put us in one moment of worrying about where he was.”

Shortly after the disappearance, Rick Snowdon said: “I just want to know anything about my father. Not knowing and not hearing from anyone is terrible for us.”