Search for Son Consumes a Father

The place is nothing like the father imagined, this exquisite sandstone ravine framed by junipers and gamble oaks, yucca cacti and manzanita bushes.

He thought it would be more remote, more forbidding. He thought he would sense danger.

The colors are as rich as oil paintings: burnished reds and earthen browns, pale sandstone, gray granite, white limestone. But the father’s eyes are drawn to the one color that doesn’t belong, the fluorescent green police line slashed across the trunk of the giant ponderosa.

Kneeling at its base, he pulls a chisel from his toolbox. Slowly he starts to carve. Stooped, silver-haired, he resembles a priest at an altar.

His name is John Kearney, and people tell him he’s a hero. But he doesn’t feel like one.

He chips away methodically. The only sound, aside from his scraping, is the catlike cry of a mockingbird. Gradually, a perfect white cross appears in the bark. The father allows himself a quiet nod.

Then he pulls out his penknife and starts carving a name.

*

The events that led Kearney to Oak Creek Canyon began three months earlier, on an icy January morning in Scranton, Pa. He was at work at his electrical contracting company when his wife called.

“J.D.’s missing.”

Their 23-year-old son hadn’t returned from a student conference in Arizona, hadn’t been seen in two days, hadn’t phoned. His friend Damean Freas was missing too.

Kearney’s co-workers had never seen their boss so worried. “Cool Hand Luke,” they jokingly call Kearney. The guy just walks into a room and everyone knows who’s in charge.

“Jeez, John,” one said. “Maybe they went someplace and stayed a couple of days.”

But Kearney was close to tears.

There was no doubt in his mind that J.D. would have packed everything he could into his four-day trip to Arizona, would have savored it all, from the giant saguaros of the desert to the night life in Phoenix to hiking in the mountains with friends.

“Seize the day,” J.D. was always urging his younger brothers, the line borrowed from his favorite movie, “Dead Poets Society.” But he wouldn’t have lingered without calling; he wouldn’t have seized the day without letting them know.

J.D. was named for his father, but he was his mother’s son. Warm. Creative. Sure of himself, but in an understated way. The whole family had cheered when he won a scholarship to medical school. In his second year, swamped with studies, he would still bounce home on weekends to go skiing with his brothers or exploring the woods with his mom.

The student physician with the poet’s soul. J.D. was going to make a great doctor someday.

But where the heck was he? Why hadn’t he called?

Kearney knew just one way to start the search--in a brainstorming session with his brother, Donald, and with his friend, John Cappelloni. In 30 years together, they had designed and built some of the most complicated electrical systems in the Northeast, from ski mountains to hospitals to airports. Problem-solving was their business.

Could they solve the riddle of the missing son?

In his office in the Scranton Industrial Park, Kearney told them what he knew. J.D. and a group of his friends had been in Phoenix for a weekend student conference. Most had returned on Monday, but J.D. and Damean had stayed an extra day. Another friend was supposed to pick them up at the airport on Tuesday morning. They hadn’t shown up for two days.

Damean’s father wasn’t worried. They’re adults, he said over the phone. Give them a little more time.

We don’t have time, Kearney insisted. We have to start searching now.

“Where do we start?” Cappelloni asked.

“We follow the money,” Kearney replied. “If we can trace where they spent their money, we can find the boys.”

*

“My son is missing. I need your help.”

Thousands of miles away, Kathy Ervien could hear the hurt in the father’s voice. I’m a parent myself, she told him. I’ll do everything I can to help.

Such kindness, flowing from a faraway stranger, brought tears to Kearney’s eyes. He struggled to stay composed. Getting emotional would only waste time.

Ervien was the clerk at the National rental car company, which has a desk at the Phoenix hotel where the friends stayed. The hotel staff had been polite but dismissive when Kearney called, telling him that his son had checked out two days ago, that they couldn’t help.

Ervien understood she had to do something more.

She pulled the records. Sure enough, Damean Freas had rented a car on Monday, a green Chevy Cavalier. It hadn’t been returned. Kearney had one last question: “What are the roads like in Phoenix? Are there many accidents?”

At a desk across the room, his brother Donald was on the phone asking police the same question.

*

When friends and family members heard J.D. was missing, they all thought of the same verse:

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life!”

J.D. embraced Henry David Thoreau’s lines as though they were written for him. He stamped them on T-shirts, in notebooks, recited them to siblings and friends. He hinted at them in his application to medical school, writing how he wanted to understand the human spirit as well as the body. He quoted them in valentines to his mom.

At home, in a suburb of Scranton, Lois Kearney waited by the phone and prayed. In Philadelphia, the woman he loved prayed too.

“Dear St. Anthony,” Raquel Szlanic wrote in her journal, “please come around, for Damean and John have been lost and they cannot be found.”

Please find J.D., she thought. Please find him so we can eat sushi together again and I can tease him about how skinny he is getting. Please find him so that we can sit in the bleachers and watch planes in the night sky and wonder where the world will take us.

*

“My son is missing. I need your help.”

By Wednesday evening, the words thumped in Kearney’s head like the chorus of a song he couldn’t shake. His brother and friend had their own versions:

“My nephew is missing. . . .”

“My friend’s son is missing. . . .”

Call after call after call: airlines, hotels, taxicab companies, hot-air balloon rides. They contacted the National Missing Persons Organization and filed a report. They called 14 hospitals and clinics, 28 police stations.

Nothing.

At the end of the day, Kearney called Visa, his son’s credit card company. Pretending to be J.D., he asked for his weekend charges. The last one was for $100 on Sunday afternoon. J.D. had gone skydiving.

*

Arms outstretched, backs arched, they free-fall over the desert in a blur of wind and color.

Damean is queasy from the start. J.D. is elated. Another great adventure. Another thrill to tell his brothers when he bursts in the door and they tumble over him on the next weekend trip home.

He has so much to tell about Arizona: the desert, the hiking, the Jeep ride through the dusty trails of John Wayne country, where so many cowboy movies were made.

But leaping from a plane at 13,500 feet!

His mom will shudder. His sister will laugh at his daring. And Raquel will make him describe exactly how it feels to glide like a bird in the sky.

One minute of breathless free-falling before the parachutes open and they float down, landing with a gentle bump.

*

For a moment, Kearney was unnerved by the skydiving, but not for long. The dive took place on Sunday; J.D. hadn’t checked out of the hotel until Monday.

So Kearney pestered the credit card company again, insisting there must be a later charge. He was right: $125 for a helicopter ride on Monday.

Thursday morning, more than 24 hours since Kearney launched his phone blitz, Cindy Rahn’s voice sparkled over the line, a sweet rush of hope: “Of course I remember your son. Who could forget his smile?”

Rahn works for Arizona Helicopter Venture, which flies tourists through the canyons of Sedona.

Sedona? Where the heck was that? Even as he listened to Rahn, Kearney scrambled to pull up information from the Internet.

Sedona, mystical desert town of red-hued cliffs and sculpted sandstone buttes. One hundred miles north of Phoenix. Home to hikers and tourists and New Age artists, elk and deer and Indian ruins. No wonder J.D., ever the history buff, ever the outdoorsman, had headed there.

His son was stranded somewhere 2,300 miles from home. And this exuberant stranger was describing J.D. with a warmth that made his father cry.

J.D. was just so interested in everything, Rahn said, in the rocks and the geology and the Indian ruins. And his friend, Damean. He was such a nice young man too, but more hurried. He kept teasing J.D. about how he always took so much time.

Kearney laughed. That was them, all right.

After the helicopter ride, J.D. had wanted to see more of the scenery before they headed back to Phoenix. Rahn suggested Oak Creek Canyon.

Kearney’s voice was urgent again: Is it possible to rent your helicopter? Can I pay you to search for my son?

An hour later, the chopper was in the air, whirling above the canyons and creeks.

And Kearney was back in action in Scranton, faxing photographs to the sheriff’s office in Flagstaff, digging up maps of Sedona, downloading weather conditions.

For the first time, Kearney felt a surge of confidence. They were on the trail. They would find the boys.

J.D. had camped and hiked since he was a child. He could look after himself.

“They stand a better chance in the hills of Sedona than in the streets of Phoenix,” Kearney quipped to a detective on the phone.

But not for long. It had been warm for January, temperature in the 30s in the canyons at night. But the forecast was for subfreezing temperatures and snow. If J.D. and Damean were lost, they had to be found soon.

About 1 p.m., six hours after Kearney first spoke to Rahn, the phone rang. It was the helicopter company.

“They found the car.”

*

Night falls fast and cold in the desert, and the craggy canyon walls block even the moon.

It is late afternoon as J.D. and Damean start up the trail. The day has been warm and sunny, temperatures in the high 50s--their last day of freedom before catching a late flight to Philadelphia.

Sedona seduces them, red and gold cliffs rising like turreted cathedrals from the desert. They gasp at its beauty, its mystery. They talk about their families, their studies, their hopes.

As the sun sets, they vow to remember this day for the rest of their lives.

They can’t believe how cold it is getting, or how fast darkness falls. Suddenly the picturesque trail is dark and foreboding. To light the path, they pop the flash on John’s camera and stumble forward, laughing at their ingenuity.

Flash! A few more steps.

Shivering, Damean sits on a rock to catch his breath. J.D. takes off his windbreaker and hands it to his friend. They don’t realize they are at the edge of a precipice. Damean reaches for the windbreaker, stumbles, and he’s gone.

“Damean!” J.D. cries into the darkness.

*

Detective Dave Cardinell and Sgt. Jeff Drayton were the first to arrive at the scene, pulling in beside the Cavalier in a clearing just south of Pine Flats campground. They started up the trail, their calls bouncing off the canyon walls.

DAMEAN!

JOHN!

A police rescue helicopter whirred above, but the winds were picking up; the pilot couldn’t descend low enough, so he turned back. The cops continued, finding none of the clues they were looking for. No cigarette butts, no water bottles, nothing to indicate two hikers had passed this way.

Frustrated, they headed back down. They would need daylight, and dozens of officers, to comb these hills.

At the cruiser, Cardinell sniffed the air suspiciously and glanced back up the canyon.

Smoke!

A thin column spiraled out of the rocks a few hundred yards from the trail. The cops sprinted toward the spot, yelling with all their might.

In a crevice beneath a 70-foot sandstone cliff, they found him, a crumpled figure lying awkwardly on his back, covered in blood, right foot uncovered, blue from frostbite. Flames were leaping all around.

“Help,” he whimpered. “Don’t let me burn.”

For three days and nights, he had lain there, delirious, hypothermic, close to death. He didn’t know the body of his friend lay just 20 feet away, cradled in the base of a giant ponderosa.

He was hallucinating, ranting incoherently. For several hours, police weren’t sure which student they had rescued or which father to call to break the news.

In Scranton, Kearney’s telephones, which had been ringing madly all day, fell eerily quiet. What had they found in Oak Creek Canyon? Why didn’t they call?

Three hours passed before word finally came.

*

It takes three months before the father can bring himself to hike up Oak Creek Canyon. But he knows he has to go. He has to see for himself the charred crevice where the survivor set a fire to signal the police, has to touch the tree where his son came to rest.

Kneeling by its trunk, he carves the initials.

J.D.K.

The last letter is the hardest. As the bark falls away, the father’s body shakes with sobs.

“I love you,” he whispers.

*

Epilogue:

J.D.’s mother wears his socks. His 21-year-old sister hugs his sweaters. His brothers, 14 and 10, write poems about their idol, how it’s OK to cry.

The woman he loved turns her tiny loft into a shrine in his memory, a place where candles flicker beside his drawings and the sweet verses he wrote.

No one knows precisely what happened at Oak Creek Canyon. Police think J.D. lost his footing as he clambered down the cliff to help his friend. They are sure of little else, other than the miracle of Damean’s survival--and John Kearney’s role in finding him.

Damean wrestles every day with a foot that has no feeling and a heart that has too much. He says he tries to be less hurried now, more serene, more like J.D. This is his tribute to his best friend and to the man who saved his life.

Lois Kearney draws comfort from Damean’s words and from watching his recovery. Two months after the accident, he managed to walk, despite a steel rod in his leg and nerve damage from frostbite.

John Kearney struggles to find consolation in the life he saved. He needs to do something more for the one he couldn’t. So he designs and builds a cross, a beautiful aluminum cross, three feet high and weighing 50 pounds. Tamper-proof, weatherproof, it is an engineering masterpiece. At Oak Creek Canyon, he drills a hole in a rock and anchors the cross.

It glints there in the sun, barely visible from the side of the road, as immovable as the canyon itself, as eternal as the scrub and the sunsets and the mockingbirds.

As eternal as a father’s love.

This story is based on interviews with the Kearney family and friends; Damean Freas and his father, Bill Freas; law enforcement officials in Phoenix and Flagstaff; rescuers; roommates and friends of J.D. Kearney; staff members of Arizona Helicopter Venture in Sedona; and employees of the National rental car company and the National Missing Persons Organization.