Man buys one-day pass to Utah park and is found dead days later, officials say
A man bought a one-day pass to a southern Utah state park — then vanished, officials said.
Neal Mower, a man in his 60s from Ivins, bought the day pass to Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park about 11 a.m. on Thursday, April 10, the Kane County Utah Sheriff’s Office said in an April 14 post on Facebook.
Three days later, campers in the area realized that while they had seen his vehicle there, they hadn’t seen him, the department said.
The man’s brother posted to Facebook saying Mower drove a truck towing a small cargo trailer that had been modified for camping. The man usually brings a green four-wheeler, but since it wasn’t found at his truck his family believes he might have left on it.
“The doors to his trailer were open,” department Lieutenant Alan Alldredge told KUTV. “It looked suspicious and that’s when they called us, that someone might be overdue on a sand dune somewhere.”
Deputies searched his truck and trailer for clues but didn’t find “anything out of the ordinary,” officials said in the post. They spoke with campers in the area and coordinated with the Ivins Police Department to check his home, officials said.
Dispatchers worked with the man’s cell phone company to find his phone and use its data to try to determine where he might have gone, officials said.
“The last pings from his phone were on Thursday afternoon,” Alldredge told KUTV. “So, his phone battery either died or he was in a bad spot and it just wasn’t getting out. Our biggest struggle with this type of rescue is communication.”
Limited cell service is a common issue in the park, he told the outlet.
Crews searched the area based on clues from his cell phone data until dark on Sunday, but didn’t find him.
A helicopter search crew found Mower’s body Monday morning about 1.8 miles from his vehicle, officials said.
A medical investigator handled the scene and the man’s body was sent to the Utah State Medical Examiner’s Office in Salt Lake City, officials said.
The park is about a 70-mile drive east from Ivins, where the man was from, and about a 310-mile drive southwest from Salt Lake City.
