My husband and I visited Seattle and Portland last summer. There were more homeless people than I have ever witnessed in any city. It was unbelievable. They were everywhere. They were even sleeping on the highway medians. All the sidewalks reeked of urine. Apparently there are more homeless in Oregon than in any other US state. Homeless people sleep in parks (there is one next to the school) and use any open public bathroom (doors to school were open). Maybe one of the 1600 homeless people in Multnomah County grabbed Kyron.
Respectfully snipped because I'm going to be verbose and don't want to take up a ton of space.
Yes, from what I understand, the coast from San Francisco to Seattle is a well-traveled, like, homeless/nomad kind of route/pattern. The City of Eugene, and/or possibly all of Lane County, have tons of camping areas, and some specified areas where people can apply to park and live there for a while. And people sometimes just park their trailer wherever, without permission, for a while and hang out.
I work for an educational district in the Eugene/Springfield area and we've had situations where strangers have come into the school and shouldn't have been...briefly, here are two of those situations:
1) Before they instituted better safety precautions, the cafeteria worker was cooking one day and suddenly looked up to see an filthy and intoxicated man less than a foot away from her. I believe he asked her for money and/or cigarettes and/or drugs, and/or bathroom, but she ended up having to ask him to leave all on her own, without anyone really even within earshot. Lucky for her, said creepy guy was not too quick on his feet and she was!
2) My co-worker/friend used to have to sit up front to cover the receptionist's breaks, and she'd get creeped out sometimes being alone up there if there weren't a lot of people around, so when my break coincided, I'd hang out up there. One day, this woman staggers in, mutters something about the bathroom, all the while ignoring said friend's insistence that the bathroom is not for public use. She just walked in and locked the front bathroom. A few minutes later, she comes out, looking s t o n e d out of her gourd, and walked out the front door. I went to check the bathroom, and sure enough, there was a syringe with some black stuff in it just sitting on the floor! The Police, whose station is within a block of this place, had to come get said syringe.
So, point is, yeah, there are a lot of homeless and/or nomadic and/or mentally ill and/or addicted, etc. people around here. But that school is rural and would seem out of the way.... with one exception:
Also, people around here and/or nomadic/homeless people, etc. sometimes just go live in the forest for a few months, but surely we'd have heard if LE had found evidence of a nearby camp/squat place...?
Since I woke up Saturday, I've had this horrible older-kid pit in my stomach...and it sounds like I wasn't the only one...I hope we are wrong.
