CANADA Canada - Denny Poole, 14, Dawson Creek, BC, 12 March 2016

Poole was last seen on March 12 by a friend, whose name is not being released to the public. The family says they believe the two were on their way to Fort St. John to meet a girl when they somehow got split up.

Police say the two boys wandered onto a back road along the Alaska Highway in an attempt to find a short cut. Poole's friend phoned 911 at 7:52 p.m. to report what police are calling a "disturbance" on the highway.

The friend then handed the phone to a man with a "South Asian accent," who said there was no disturbance and that he had stopped to help the young man who was "acting strange," police say. RCMP have since made contact with this man — who they do not consider a suspect in the case.

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Sixty volunteer searchers combed the Kiskatinaw River valley Saturday afternoon, but found no trace of missing teen Denny Poole.

Saturday was the first volunteer search party for the 15-year-old, who disappeared from the side of the Alaska Highway in mid-March...

As of Saturday, Poole had been missing for 49 days... Poole is First Nations, 5’7” and was last seen wearing a grey DGK brand hoodie near a turnout by the Kiskatinaw River bridge.

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RCMP investigator Brett Bignell says there have been sightings of missing Dawson Creek teen Denny Poole reported from Kamloops to Valleyview, Alta., but police are still not any closer to locating him.

Tuesday marked one month since the 15-year-old went missing from a roadside between Dawson Creek and Fort St. John.

Bignell, the lead investigator on the case, has ruled out the Kamloops sighting as a case of mistaken identity, but says police do not yet have enough information to rule out the Valleyview tip.

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A year after the first official search for Denny Poole in early May 2016, not much has changed. There are still prayers for safety and a struggle to comprehend the loss.

“We prayed to the creator, so the creator could help us and get him home,” said Jenny Poole, the 15-year-old’s grandmother.

More than a year after Poole went missing, family and friends still struggle to explain the loss.

For one advocate for the family, Poole’s disappearance has highlighted an under-discussed issue: missing and murdered Indigenous men and boys.

“The days turn into weeks, the weeks turn into months, and now the months have turned into a year,” said Alisha Poole, Denny’s sister. “He’s still out there somewhere, we just haven’t found him yet. We haven’t given up.”

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Alisha Poole, Denny’s older sister, hasn’t given up hope of finding her brother, but some days, the question consumes her.

“I’m adamant on that,” she said in an interview at a Dawson Creek coffee shop Sept. 22. “Until there’s a body in front of me, or there’s definitive proof my brother’s not here any more, in my mind he’s still alive. Everyone else can think what they want.”

For Sharla Bruun, a social worker with Aboriginal Family Services who’s been a spokesperson for the family, Denny’s disappearance has troubling parallels with another B.C. highway.

“For me, it reminded me of the Highway of Tears—how these people, these women, they’re just there, then they’re not,” she said. “How does that happen? There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about this. Someone, somewhere, knows something, about all of those women, and about Denny. They don’t just disappear.”

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It’s not clear when Denny and his friend set out from Dawson Creek. The two split up at around 7:30 on the south side of the Kiskatinaw river. If the two had walked the entire way on the highway, getting there would have taken over six hours. The kids probably hadn’t planned on being out after dark: Denny was reportedly wearing a grey sweatshirt, jeans and running shoes. The low temperature that day was -6 C.

After the two split up, the details get hazy. Denny’s friend called the RCMP at 7:52 to report what police describe as a suspicious occurrence, but investigators later said this might have been a “hypothermic delusion.” At some point during the call, a man with “what sounded like a heavy South Asian accent” began speaking to police on the boy’s phone, saying he’d stopped to help the young man, who was “acting strange.” Both the youth and the man with the accent were ruled out as suspects.

Alisha said police were driving the highway and backroads around the Kiskatinaw that night, as soon as her brother was reported missing. They found no sign of him.

The search widened in the days and weeks that followed. First, RCMP combed the area with dogs. They asked people living in the area to search their outbuildings, in case the missing boy had taken shelter in a barn. About a week later, police requisitioned a helicopter from a southern detachment to fly over the area. Denny’s picture was distributed to media across Canada.

Nothing.

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After all that searching, Alisha doesn’t believe her brother was swallowed up by the wilderness.

“There’s no way he would have been able to wander that far into the woods. The snow was past-my-knee deep,” she said. “It was at least 2-3 feet deep in the woods.”

That leaves one option: Denny got into someone’s vehicle.

“He must have been cold and tired and hungry and just wanted to come home,” Bruun said. “Somebody was coming back to Dawson and offered him a ride. This is what we kind of assume: he got in, and that was it.”

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