A fisherman in Japan found a backpack belonging to Pattie Wu-Murad, a missing hiker from Storrs, last week near the guest house she was staying at when she was last seen in April 2023.
When police investigated, they also found a shoe belonging to Wu-Murad, as well as towel she had purchased from Amazon and a pouch with nail clippers in it.
Police notified her husband Kirk Murad of the findings. No other traces of Wu-Murad were found.
“Initially I felt very, very sad, a lot the same emotions as when we went out there, then back to frustration because nothing happened in the last week,” Murad said.
“We’re trying to figure out if we should send another search party. That would be the next step. We have to figure out the cost and who’s available,” he said.
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On March 4, 2023 Kirk Murad dropped Pattie, his wife of 33 years, off at Newark Airport. That was the last time he saw her. Pattie, 60, was retired from her job at United Technologies and was an experienced hiker who had traveled all over the world.
On the morning of April 10, she set out to hike 11.2 miles on the Kumano Kodo Trail in a mountainous area of Japan. The owner of the hostel where she had stayed the night before pointed her to the trailhead, and that was the last time anyone reported seeing her.
Murad had spoken to his wife the week before. She told him she might not be able to contact him because she was in a remote area, so he thought nothing of it when he didn’t hear from her for a few days. He got a call from the U.S. Embassy on April 14 telling him she was missing, and the local police had been looking for her and he immediately rushed to Japan with his daughter Murphy and son Bryce.
Multiple search and rescue teams, police, volunteers, and Murad and two of their children, spent thousands of hours scouring the area on foot and with helicopters and drones, but no trace of her had been found until now.
The backpack was found near a trail that Wu-Murad was not supposed to be on, he said.
The entries to both trails are close to each other, but Murad said his wife was such experienced hiker that it’s hard to think she would make that kind of mistake.
“The trail wasn’t really well-marked until after she went missing,” he said.
Murad said his son hiked this particular trail when the family went to Japan to look for Wu-Murad and that it was treacherous. His daughter and search and rescue team also searched on the trail.
“We did mathematical probability, the probability was 90 percent that if she fell, she fell to the left,” he said. “So we searched to the left and the bag was found to the right.
“But we don’t know if she got on the wrong trail. It just raises more questions than it gives answers,” he said.
Murad of Storrs met his wife on his first day at Pratt & Whitney in 1985. They were both engineers and someone introduced them. Five years later, they were married.
Wu-Murad, 60, was retired from United Technologies and was an experienced hiker who had traveled all over the world. She set out on the morning of April 10 to hike 11.2 miles on the Kumano Kodo Trail in a mountainous area of central Japan. The hostel owner pointed her to the trailhead, and that was the last time anyone reported seeing her.
Kirk Murad, a longtime educator and coach, found out on April 14, 2023 that his wife was missing when he got a call from the U.S. Embassy. Their daughter Murphy, who lives in Singapore, arrived in Japan April 16 after starting a GoFundMe page that has raised over $165,000 to help fund a search and rescue mission to find her mother. Kirk arrived April 17 and his son Bryce April 18, 2023.
Search and rescue teams, both from the U.S. and Japan, searched the entire trail, as well as places where Wu-Murad could have fallen, and police had helicopters out searching in 2023.
Wu-Murad, who had recently retired, had hiked in Spain, France, Egypt and Jordan. She had been in Japan since March 5, 2023 when she visited a friend in Tokyo and did some other trekking, including part of the 88-Temple Walk on the island of Shikoku before setting out to hike Kumano Kodo, an ancient pilgrimage trail in the mountains of Wakayama.
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