Urban missing persons search

[Walkman]

Was leading a GT this weekend during a SAREX. We finished our first tasking of the day and was given a new mission in the field: finding a missing person in the area. We were told it was an 82 yr old man, grey slacks & jacket wearing a red scarf and the LKP was at the location we had been at from our previous tasking for about 1.5 hours.

I'm a newer GTL, so this was the first time I've had to lead a mission like this. We had no other info to go on, just the age/clothing (not even H/W) and LKP (which we knew wasn't a good starting point as we'd been there for a while already).

I'd like some feedback and ideas for the next time I'm tasked with one of these. We were called off after about 45 minutes and given another tasking, so we never found our target.

Here's what I did:

We're in a very rural, middle-of-nowhere community at a park along the river. The park is about 100 yards long. When I first got the call, I sent a line search to cover the park and look for any clues. They found nothing, because the target hadn't actually been there. There is one house just to the south of the parking lot. We knocked on the door, to see if they had seen anything. No one home. The rest of the road to the south is pretty much unpopulated as far as we could see. The park seems to be at the edge of the main area of population. We're about 1/2 mile out of the center of town, so we head north. We stop at another house near the park and ask the homeowner if he had seen the target. He hadn't. We head to the center of town. After searching a small field for any clues, I split us up into three teams. One team takes the south side of the street from a main intersection, the other takes the north, both heading west. I take the other team east. Each team stops and asked anyone out on the street or in the few businesses/homes in the area if they have seen the target. One of my stops was a gas station at the intersection. The clerk remembered seeing someone with the scarf, but all she knew was which door he left from. That was our only actual sighting. We headed down another road east about a 1/4 mile as we had seen another park on our way in and thought it might be a good idea to look there. Nothing. We were called off on our way back to town.

How did I do? Does it sound like I had a good strategy in asking around the downtown area for sightings, or should I have taken a different approach? It was hard for me to really get a good feel as the sortie was so short and we didn't end up actually finding the target.

What are some best practices for this kind of scenario?

[LSThiker]

What feedback did your GBD give you?

[Walkman]

What feedback did your GBD give you?

Not much, really. "Good job".

We were the team farthest out and the last ones back to mission base. Everyone was ready to leave after a long day and most of the base staff had already packed up. My debrief was a little "brief".

[lordmonar]

As a GTL....your job is to search your grid.  Sounds like you did a good job of it.

The question really is.....did your Planning Section do a good job.

In a missing person search...the key is "containment".  That is get a cordon around the LKP to keep your search target from "escaping" into the "wild".

Once you got the containment up....then you send in the grid searchers.

[Eclipse]

+1 on the PSC's role. If you get to a given search area without a very clear idea of the what's and why's, the PSC has failed to
create a good tasking that can be turned into tactics by the GBD.