On a November night in 2010, gunfire lit up a dark, desert canyon near Utah’s Dead Horse State Park.
It was a brief, brutal confrontation that brought both parties to the brink of death. Park ranger Brady Young, who was shot in in his lung, heart, shoulder, back, hip and groin during the confrontation, eventually dragged himself back to his patrol truck to call for help.
The other man, thought to be 40-year-old Lance Leeroy Arellano based on the 1999 silver Pontiac found parked in the bushes several miles south of the scene, simply vanished into the park’s maze of towering red rock.
Despite a weeks-long manhunt that filled the canyon with dozens of black-clad investigators and search planes’ steady whine, the trail went cold. Either Arellano was dead, or he’d somehow slipped past the swarms of officers. The FBI put out a notice of a $30,000 reward for information about the missing man - whose criminal record included drug and assault charges, according to CBS - and waited for someone to come forward who could hopefully help authorities solve the mystery of Arellano’s whereabouts.
Five years later, someone finally has.
Brothers Caleb and Jarom Shumway, a pair of aspiring Hardy Boys from nearby Moab, Utah, who dedicated their Christmas break to searching the canyon where Arellano disappeared, uncovered remains thought to belong to the shooter last week, putting an end to the years-old mystery.
Caleb, 23, a college student home for the holidays, had always been darkly curious about the years-old case. His police officer father had been involved in the manhunt in 2010, he told KSTU, so the Shumway brothers knew all about how Arellano seemed to disappear into the park’s craggy landscape.
The narrow canyons and sharp ridges of rock gave Arellano “the upper hand,” Grand County Sheriff Jim Nyland had said at the time. It was a nearly impossible place to find someone, especially someone with the skill and sufficient incentive to stay hidden.
Caleb Shumway nevertheless believed he could locate Arellano. The Eagle Scout had grown up exploring the area’s caves and crevasses, and he’d talked with his father enough to get a good idea of where Arellano may have hidden from officers. He recruited his 15-year-old brother, Jarom, and they set out in search of clues.
“I go crawl under rocks for fun,” Shumway told the Associated Press. “So spending a couple days, couple weeks, looking for a body sounded like a fun deal to me.”
The brothers were prepared to dedicate their entire break to the mystery - it had, after all, eluded scores of professional investigators. But it turned out they only needed 48 hours.
On their second day of searching, Caleb Shumway told the Salt Lake Tribune, the brothers slipped through a narrow opening into a small, cramped cave. Just near the cavern’s mouth lay a bag containing a handgun and magazine and a single human bone.
The brothers took some photos, then hopped out of the cave and hurried to tell the police. They met with law enforcement on Dec. 24, who returned to the cave for a more thorough search. Even deeper into the void in the rocks, they discovered another backpack, a gun, clothing and a skeleton.
Police believe that skeleton belongs to Arellano. The remains have been sent to the Utah State Medical Examiner’s office for identification, according to a Sheriff’s Office press release.
Shumway hopes that his hunch was correct - the promised $30,000 FBI reward is “pretty appealing” to “a poor college student,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune, and it’s one of the main reasons he started his search.
But he also hopes to provide some closure to Young, the park ranger who was shot by Arellano five years ago. Then 34, the ranger had pulled over at a dark trailhead to talk with a man in a parked vehicle to tell him he was camping illegally. When he asked Arellano who he was, the man responded with a fake name and birth date, according to the Tribune.
Young turned toward his truck to check the information, and was shot in the back nine times. He fired back, then crawled 30 desperate feet to his car to summon help. He survived by virtue of that 30-foot crawl, a skilled team of doctors and several small miracles, he told the Deseret News: the Moab hospital’s blood bank was well stocked, a blood clot kept his heart from bleeding out, the wallet in his pocket stopped a bullet that could have killed him.
Meanwhile, more than 150 investigators fanned out across the eastern Utah desert, scouring the dusty red landscape. They found Arellano’s car, along with a gun, a backpack and a bloody tourniquet, according to KSL. But they could not find the missing man.
After the shooting, it alarmed Young that Arellano had never been apprehended.
“I didn’t know what had happened to the guy,” he told the Deseret News. “I was wondering if they [Young’s wife and kids] were safe.”
Shumway wanted to put an end to that worry.
“It’s really exciting finding some closure for all the families involved, all the police involved, and then just getting to be in the middle of it,” he told KSTU. “It’s exciting, and it feels good.”
utah-coldcase
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