OSO — Efforts to find them have been exhaustive and exhausting.
Over nine days starting April 13, Snohomish County Search and Rescue and trained volunteers from other groups spent more than 2,070 hours trying to recover an Arlington area-couple believed killed by an angry former neighbor and his brother. That total does not include the hours spent by Snohomish County sheriff deputies scouring the woods and brush.
The effort to find Patrick Shunn, 45, and Monique Patenaude , 46, has included ground searchers, man trackers and helicopter crews as well as teams on horseback and electric bikes and dogs trained in finding bodies.
They’ve combed properties and rural land fanning out from the Oso neighborhood off Whitman Road where Shunn and Patenaude lived on more than 20 acres.
Their former neighbor, John Reed, 53, and his brother, Tony Reed, 49, are suspected of killing the pair, who were last heard from April 11. The Reed brothers are fugitives whose trail has led police from Oso to Ellensburg to Arizona, California and Mexico.
Early on, Sheriff Ty Trenary said the top priority of the investigation was to find the couple.
“We haven’t stopped looking,” said sheriff Sgt. Danny Wikstrom, who heads up the agency’s search and rescue operations. “We have been reviewing what we have done and what more to do.”
The search area is vast as well as steep and in places covered by dense stands of trees and brush.
“It has been taxing,” Wikstrom said.
It also hasn’t been the only missing person case requiring intense attention of search and rescue volunteers.
When 16-year-old Tyler Christensen disappeared in south Snohomish County, 58 search and rescue volunteers spent more than 280 hours looking for him April 20.
Christensen was last seen the day before near his home in the Picnic Point area between Edmonds and Mukilteo.
Sheriff’s investigators later came to believe the teen had made plans to leave his home.
At Oso, John Reed knew and often explored the rustic Stillaguamish Valley countryside. County records indicate that relatives in 2003 deeded him the Whitman Road property, which was immediately east of the land where Shunn and Patenaude made their home.
Trackers located a semi-underground bunker hidden in a wooded area about 200 yards north of John Reed’s former property. The bunker, built with railroad ties, yielded no evidence. Searchers also found an underground room underneath a detached metal pole building on John Reed’s former property.
Investigators believe other bunkers could be out there, according to a search warrant.
The former Reed property borders the hillside that collapsed during the Oso mudslide in 2014. John Reed sold to Snohomish County in March for $244,000, but remained on the land and was warned by county officials to leave.
An acquaintance of John Reed told detectives that the suspect once indicated he “was capable of killing people without any problems” and searchers “would never be able to locate the bodies as he would get rid of them in the area of timber above the slide area,” according to court records.
A reward of up to $5,000 is being offered for information directly leading to the arrest of the Reed brothers. Anyone with tips should contact Deputy U.S. Marshal Robert Gerg at robert.gerg@usdoj.gov, or the U.S. Marshals Service Communications Center at 1-800-336-0102, or usms.wanted@usdoj.gov.
Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446; stevick@heraldnet.com.
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