It’s been two years this week since James Woods’ body was found in a frozen West Kelowna field, though for those who love him, time has stood still.
“It still feels like yesterday. It still feels like I’m searching for my son. It doesn’t feel real at all,” Patricia Wood said Tuesday, standing near where her son laid down and ultimately died.
James, 27, was autistic and had been missing for 56 days before his remains were found. He had been unwell and after an appointment with a psychologist, he fled his home in only his pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. He walked some distance down Copper Ridge Drive, and was seen by multiple people, according to reports that came in after his death was confirmed.
Patricia said Tuesday, while standing at the location where her son was found, the official search for him was brief and fruitless and something more should have been done.
She believes changes in the way missing people are dealt with need to be made and is advocating for something like an alert system, that would have amplified the search and allowed those looking to be mindful of the specific needs of people with autism.
“I wouldn’t want this to happen to (anybody’s) child or adult child,” she said. “James was an adult child but he was in need of medical attention and he was on the spectrum of autism and had a hard time with judgment and making clear decisions, especially as he had gotten sick … it made him so much more vulnerable.”
The Silver Alert model is what she thinks needs to be put in place. It’s a public notification system available in the U.S. and some Canadian provinces to help track down Alzheimer patients with a tendency to wander. When set into motion, it provides information to media outlets and/or activates an emergency alert system through law enforcement agencies.
Such an alert system would also ensure that those who keep an eye out for the person who is missing are mindful of their specific conditions.
Had one been in place when James set out on his fateful walk, she believes he’d have been found earlier.
Copper Ridge Drive – a main road in West Kelowna – and Patricia said they found out much too late that people had seen him walking.
“He would have been walking all the way up there…and how many people actually drove by and saw him?” she said. “There were more legitimate leads but the police did not inform the family until after the fact.”
He would have stood out, in the sense that he was far too underdressed for the conditions, which were wintry that year. And, he didn’t stray far from that main stretch. It was Jasmine Brown who ultimately found his remains when she joined a community group that had started searching for James after the official search fell flat.
“There was a Facebook group formulated by a lady who creates Facebook groups for missing people and she had reached out to me and asked if I was willing to put together a little search party to come out to this area,” Brown said. “So I collected a couple of friends and we drove out here and just looking at a map.”
A tip had been made through Crimestoppers that someone had spotted James in the area and thought the nearby creek was a smart place to look.
“We started snowshoeing around and we found them within 10 minutes,” she said. “It does seem bizarre that he was so close to a main road and yet he was missing for so long.”
Complicating the search was the weather. It had snowed a lot after James was found.
“According to the RCMP it was a miracle because they don’t think we would have found him the day prior or the day after,” she said.
Since finding James, she’s remained in touch with Patricia. She knows, if something like that had happened to her, she’d want the community to reach out and help any way they could, as well.
As for Patricia, she will keep advocating for change and remembering the son whose life was lost too soon.
“He was brilliant. He loved to play his guitar his ukulele his wind flew his keyboards and he loved to sing and he could write poetry,” he said. “He was only 27 and he never got to really live life beyond the four walls at home.”