Deceased/Not Found AZ - Samuel Grider, 70, Buckeye, Sept 2014

Tom Asimou, a Phoenix attorney, has increasingly taken an interest in missing persons cases. He successfully argued for the death declaration in the case of Thomas Keith Smith, who walked out on his wife after a heated 2013 argument over "communication issues."

He never came home. While it was believed he was dead, his body was never found.
Since then, Asimou has taken a handful of other case, some that don't fit neatly into a case file or clear-cut mold.

He and a team of private investigators most recently combed through the Southwest Valley desert looking for signs of a missing veteran and Maricopa County Sheriff's Office posseman who disappeared in 2014. Though the search came up empty, the effort helped Asimou prove to a judge that the man should be declared dead.

Tools like NAMUS, along with fast-tracking searches and keeping cases top of mind, are essential in working missing persons, Asimou said.

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DESERT NEAR BUCKEYE — Sand here turns to muck in the lightest rain. Water gushes down the Estrella hillsides, pours into a drainage basin and sweeps away beer cans, bullet fragments and anything in its path.In the cool season, the sun is relentless.

It's deadly the rest of the year.

This is where 70-year-old Samuel L. Grider Sr. drove in September 2014, determined to find a shortcut to the remote Buckeye-area home he shared with his dogs and chickens.

It's believed the former Maricopa County Sheriff's Office posseman eased his Chevy pickup onto a dusty desert road near Mobile to bypass Wednesday's rush hour. He passed a fire station, inched along a landfill and skirted Sonoran Desert National Monument.
Grider was a devout shortcut taker, comfortable using back roads and navigating remote Valley paths. Twenty years with the posse, a career in the military and stints as a private investigator and state law enforcer made him comfortable with his own compass.

Likely on his agenda that sultry summer evening was to make use of the plywood he had picked up from his ex-wife's Southeast Valley home. The animals needed a new coop, and the lumber would do the trick.
But Grider never made it home.

It wasn't until his abandoned truck was reported near a bend in a wash near Komatke Road and Bullard Avenue later that month that speculation intensified, the gravity of the situation settling in.

The lumber was in the truck bed. But Grider was nowhere in sight.

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