Shaun Rentz didn’t like to get his shoes dirty. The 27-year-old Minnesota man was fit, hard-working and went to the gym, but he wasn’t the type to wander off bushwhacking through the woods.
His friends and family also didn’t think Rentz seemed suicidal in the days leading up to his disappearance at the end of July.
So when his silver 2004 Audi turned up at the Oak Creek Overlook, searchers and the family didn’t know what to think. His family said he loved the car and wouldn’t have abandoned it lightly. Rentz also had never been to the Sedona area and had no reason to flee his Great Lakes home unannounced.
The ensuing search was one of the largest in recent years and frustrated Coconino County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue personnel when weeks of searching turned up nothing.
Rentz’s body was found by a hiker in early November. Officials say that if his body had stayed in the same place, searchers likely passed within 15 feet of him.
TOO FAR TO HAVE JUMPED
He was too far from the surrounding cliffs to have jumped, and the terrain would likely have been far too difficult for him to have hiked there from the overlook, detectives said.
A cause of death has yet to be determined.
“The challenging thing in this case is that we had no information about why he was there,” said Search and Rescue Coordinator Sgt. Aaron Dick. “When a vehicle just appears somewhere with no rhyme or reason to it, we could only guess.”
A U.S. Forest Service employee noticed the Audi in the overlook parking lot on Monday, July 30, and left a note to the driver that they should lock the gate behind them on their way out. The next day the car was still there. The plates returned to a missing man out of White Bear Lake, Minn. The small and picturesque lakeside city has been the muse of writers Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Rentz was supposed to have drinks with friends in the town on the evening of Saturday, July 28, but he never showed up. More concerning was when he failed to move in to his new house on Monday. That’s when his family contacted law enforcement. He was last seen at about 6 p.m. on Saturday.
Rentz was born in Mesa and had an uncle in Cottonwood, but he hadn’t been to the area since he was a child. He never told anyone he was leaving. He had recently taken a leave of absence from work after growing frustrated with his job situation, but he hadn’t seemed depressed.
“It wasn’t like he was so unhappy with his job that he seemed like he was going to harm himself,” said Lt. Brian Tozer of the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office.
He added that Rentz also had positive things happening in his life.
MOST SEARCHES RESOLVED QUICKLY
Dick organized what’s known as a “hasty search” of the immediate area, a technique that nets a rescue or retrieval almost every time. But a strong afternoon storm called off operations on the first day.
Out of the nearly 100 cases Coconino County Search and Rescue handles each year, only a couple reach the magnitude of the Rentz search. Dick says that 97 percent of searches are resolved within 12 to 24 hours of the initial call.
As they always do, Dick and other key members of the Search and Rescue team tried to fit Rentz into a personality type to help predict his behavior. They decided he was likely either despondent or was staging a disappearance — a rarity, but still a possibility they often consider.
At 6 feet, 4 inches tall and 215 pounds, Rentz was a strong physical specimen, but his family said he wasn’t known as an outdoorsman. Complicating things for Search and Rescue was the difficulty of the terrain. Below the overlook sits Pumphouse Wash, a rugged slot canyon that stretches from the confluence with James Canyon upstream, down into Oak Creek.
The search area would prove to be tough even for the seasoned volunteers.
Deputies and Search and Rescue volunteers returned on horseback and foot. Cadaver-detecting canines, a helicopter and rock climbers with experience in the area were all enlisted. An unmanned aerial vehicle was even flown for a short time with a rotating camera attached to record video that could be combed over for anything that looked out of place.
DUFFEL BAG ONLY CLUE
The drone recorded an unusual object from the air about one week into the search that turned out to be a rock, but while there searchers found a duffel bag with some toiletries inside. Rentz’s name was written in the bag, which had been stuffed into a crack near the overlook restroom. It was to be the only clue they would find.
Searchers were sent to nearby cliffs to monitor bird activity in hopes that if he had died the birds might lead them to a body. They found a deer carcass, but no other evidence.
The Rentz family stayed in the area throughout the search. They were shown the terrain and were there in hopes that if a clue was found, the family could identify it as being associated with Rentz.
Highly experienced rock climber volunteers rappelled off the cliffs near the overlook, searching through cracks and cliff-bottoms and areas of “high hazard.” Others spread out at regular intervals and walked through grids that were voted to be the most likely areas where he might be found. It typically takes a team of four an entire day to search half a square mile.
As the days ticked by, the chances increased that Rentz had left the search area and was now somewhere in the “rest of the world.”
140 SEARCHERS AND 10 DOGS
By the time the active search was suspended on Aug. 12, 140 people had taken part from Coconino, Yavapai and Pinal Counties, as well as the Arizona Department of Public Safety Air Rescue, along with 10 dogs from the different counties. Searchers had put in more than 1,100 hours.
“We don’t like to lose,” Dick said. “We want to find something, but at some point we have to make the decision to call off a search. It was very frustrating.”
“We never really shut the door on a case, we try to keep the information out in the community,” Dick said.
An off-trail hiker eventually came across the badly decomposed body on Sunday, Nov. 4.
Rentz was found near the bottom of a cliff about one mile up Pumphouse Wash from the overlook in an area called the Keyhole. Tozer, who helped hike the body out, said it would have been physically impossible for Rentz to have jumped from top to bottom in one go and too rugged to have hiked.
“You’re basically rock-hopping. Where we found him it’s very difficult to say how he got there,” Tozer said. “I don’t believe that he hiked to the location he was in.”
Investigators also say there’s no reason to think the body was moved by animals or flash floods. Rentz had been found within the one-mile radius searchers had covered extensively.
CAUSE OF DEATH STILL PENDING
Dick says the case speaks to the difficulty of trying to find someone who’s unresponsive.
During the search, a siren was sounded regularly in hopes that if Rentz was lost, he would walk toward it. Volunteers shouted his name as they scouted the canyon. Regular flyovers from the helicopter also would have surely attracted any responsive missing person’s attention.
The Coconino County Medical Examiner’s Office identified Rentz’s body within a few days using dental records, but officials say a cause of death has yet to be determined.
He was buried by his friends and family in the Rentz Cemetery in Washington County, Minn., on Nov. 18 following a well-attended celebration of life ceremony, according to a memorial website.
Eric Betz can be reached at 556-2250 or ebetz@azdailysun.com.
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