Still hoping: BYU student vanished in China 5 years ago; family believes he's alive

PROVIDENCE, Cache County — The Sneddons still remember the first thing American officials told them when they learned their son, David, was missing.

"You cannot lose an American in China," mother Kathleen Sneddon recounts. "I will never forget hearing that from the embassy."

That was five years ago.

And David Sneddon is still lost.

Missing

"We have not given up," Kathleen says. "We're never giving up on it. The case is in our minds constantly."

David was 24 when he went to China the summer before his senior year at BYU. He spent the summer improving his Mandarin Chinese in Beijing and touring the Yunnan Province.

But when he missed a flight to Seoul for an important business meeting and then missed his flight back to the United States, his family knew something was wrong.

Two weeks later, David's father, Roy, and David's older brothers, Michael and James, were in China retracing David's steps and talking with local police.

"We think he was picked up," Roy Sneddon said. "I don't think there's a question about that."

After several visits over as many years, the family has tracked David's steps through Tiger Leaping Gorge, then on to Shangri-La, where he was last seen around noon on Aug. 14, 2004.

"It's literally like he vanished," James Sneddon says. "There have been no sightings of him. … No money has been taken from his bank account. His passport hasn't crossed the border of China since he first went in five years ago. He's gone. A grown man disappeared."

Theories

"If something physical happened to him, an accident, he would have been found," James says. "We believe he's still alive, and I know there's a large number of people who think that's laughable. Whatever. That's their prerogative. If I hadn't experienced the things we experienced, I would have significant doubt, too."

The Sneddon men hiked along the "High Trail" through Tiger Leaping Gorge, where they ruled out the possibility that David fell off the trail into the river or even into a deep thicket where he couldn't be found.

The trail is too populated, and the river is too far away.

Besides, David was an Eagle Scout and an experienced hiker. He had been on more dangerous terrain in Wyoming.

Both on the gorge trail and then along the road to Shangri-La, and in Shangri-La, formerly called Zhongdian, the Sneddons met guides and shop owners who recognized David's picture on the placards the Sneddons wore around their necks.

From Shangri-La, David should have boarded a bus to go back to a youth hostel at the beginning of the gorge trail to get his backpack. He never did.