D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2008
The Seeker
Despite critics who worry she's more loose cannon than lone wolf, Jo Remondini runs her own one-woman civilian search and rescue operation.
Story and photos by Donna Clayton Lawder
The trip out to Jo Remondini's property in Cliff is like the journey to many a rural homestead in the area. It's rolling ranch land, rough roads punctuated with cattle guards and precious little in between the street signs — when there are street signs.
 |
Jo Remondini on the
front porch of the nearly complete log home she and her husband are building. |
Remondini's method of giving directions adds, well, an interesting twist to the trip, especially to a city-girl journalist coming out to take pictures. Remondini isn't sure of the exact name of this road and that, not sure if one of them even has a name. Look for a pile of rocks on the left, she says, and then "just make a right, right there." After that, why, it's simply a matter of counting cattle guards.
She goes over a segment of the directions again with an explosive little laugh, perhaps trying to put the city-girl at ease.
"It'll probably feel like you're going too far by that point, but just keep going," Remondini instructs. "Don't worry. You'll get here!"
Well, maybe — but not without some help.
In fact, thanks to some confusion over which bridge is the "Gila bridge" — the one actually in Gila, or the one in Cliff that takes you to Gila — the journalist is delayed more than half an hour. Remondini leaves the reporter a message on her cell phone (too bad there's no service out here!) and heads out for a cup of coffee in town. Meeting the journalist on a back road, and luckily recognizing her, Remondini offers to lead the rest of the way back to her house.
Passing some heavy machinery that is re-grading miles of washboard dirt road, the drive begins to feel like "too far."
At last standing on the porch of the log home she and her husband are building and are about ready to move into, Remondini puts her hands on her hips, surveys the vast vista before her and exclaims, "Well, this is why I live here. I just love this land!"
The view of the surrounding landscape is worth the trip, even worth a couple of bitten fingernails.
Asked if visitors ever have trouble finding her house, Jo Remondini gives out another of those explosive little laughs.
"Oh, I'd just go out there and search for 'em!" she says.
Though Remondini's response over missing dinner guests is meant to be humorous, she's also sincere. Searching for people missing in the wilderness, in fact, is a passion of hers.
In the past year or so, Remondini has participated in two high-profile local searches: for Carolyn Dorn, famously stranded in the Gila wilderness for 40 days and miraculously found alive by hikers, and Arsalan Serajian, a Kentucky man reported missing near the Gila Cliff Dwellings last October and, sadly, found dead some two and a half months later, an apparent suicide.
But though she participated in the searches for those two missing persons, Remondini is not part of the Grant County Search and Rescue team. She's not a forest service employee or even a member of law enforcement — nor does she want to be.
No, when she gets wind of someone needing to be found, Remondini simply saddles up her horse or mule and goes. And goes.
Something of a rodeo queen in her youth, Remondini has felt comfortable in the saddle practically since she was able to toddle. She's called the wide-open spaces of New Mexico home all her life, knowing the rolling hills and the surrounding mountain ranges in this part of the state like the proverbial back of her hand.
Her expertise and her "rugged individualist" personality combined in a surprising way when she heard about Dorn's plight in December 2006. Even though she'd never met the missing woman at that point, Remondini says she was compelled to search for Dorn. "I just knew I had to go out there looking for her," she says. It was then that Remondini realized she had a passion for search and rescue work.
But on her own terms. "Outside the box," as she prefers to think of it.
"I don't want to be bound by their rules," she says of the official emergency rescue services. "After a point, they call off a search, but I just can't stop. I can't give up on these people. If they're alive, I want to save them. And if they're not, I want to find them and give their families closure."
Though she's been doing her own thing so far, occasionally with a friend helping her search, Remondini now hopes to find a few more like-minded individuals and dreams of starting up her own Cliff-area search and rescue team.
"I'm trying to put the word out," Remondini says. "I guess we'll get a meeting going, see who's interested. They'll need first aid training, of course, and we'll just go from there."
Whether talking about standard, recognized search and rescue efforts or something like Remondini's civilian approach, getting the call to search is the first order of business. Frankie Benoist, previous president of Grant County Search and Rescue (SAR) and the Type-1 Field Coordinator for the SAR team, describes the usual process of information dissemination about a person reported missing in the wilderness.
"First there's a quick investigation to make sure it is a legitimate search," Benoist says. There can be some confusion, she explains, about the validity of a missing-person report. A family may report their loved one is lost in the wilderness when, in fact, they've gone off to Mexico, run away or simply left the area.
Once the validity of the report is determined, Benoist continues, then the incident commander for the area is contacted and that person makes the official decision to search. SAR is issued an official mission number from Santa Fe. "Then we contact the teams and send them out," she explains. Grant County SAR has rescue volunteers trained in a number of specialties, including horseback search and water search.
Not being a part of the official search and rescue team, Remondini relies on less-orthodox methods of gathering information than, say, police scanners or a phone call from the search and rescue field coordinator. Her daughter is an emergency medical technician (EMT) who, hearing about such situations in the course of her work, passes the information on to her. Remondini says she learned about Carolyn Dorn's disappearance from flyers posted around the area.
"I just called the phone number on the flyer and talked with her brother-in-law," Remondini explains. Regarding the search for Serajian, Remondini says she saw flyers tacked up at the local post office and spoke to someone there. "They told me, 'Oh, you just missed his family.' So I called the phone number and found out what I could, and told them I thought I might be able to help," she says.
Remondini says she feels especially drawn to search for missing persons with out-of-state families. Though Dorn now lives in Silver City and had been in and out of the area over the past 12 years, much of her family lives in South Carolina. Before Serajian's disappearance, he lived in Kentucky, where his family members still are located.
"They just feel so helpless," Remondini says of the families. "Their loved ones are missing in an area so far away from them, an area they may know nothing about and can only imagine. How do they know what is going on? How can they be sure that everything that can be done is being done?"
To ensure that she does everything possible to find a missing person alive, Remondini says she works long days, and plenty of them. Once on a case, she says she searches every day the weather permits it.
"At sun-up, I'm ready to take off," she says, "and I go until dark."
She admits that she sometimes exhausts herself while searching, often going well past the point of pain. The former rodeo champ has a steel rod in her back, an extra "trophy" from an old injury.
"Sometimes it's just pretty darn cold and my back's hurting bad, and I just have to stop for the day," Remondini allows.
She searched for Serajian from around Halloween, when she first heard of the case, until well into December. She'd searched 20 days in a row for Dorn and was ready to head out again, in fact, when she got word from her daughter that Dorn had been found.
Taking care to not disparage the methods of the official SAR bodies, for which she says she has much respect, Remondini does suggest that her "can't quit" standards probably keep her out in the field longer and more consistently than the others.
One could also surmise that she pushes her rescue animals as hard as she pushes herself. After searching for Dorn every day, for days on end, Remondini's horse — which she says was "very old" — had a heart attack and had to be euthanized.
Remondini says her knowledge of the area is an asset to her as a searcher. It also helps ensure her own safety, she adds. "I know this area," she says. "I don't get lost here."
Her extensive first aid, lifesaving and emergency training protect her, too, while also being critical should she find someone in the wilderness. She makes sure someone always knows when she is "out there," she says — crucial to survival in the wilderness.
"I have an agreement with my husband. I can be gone for a couple of days, and that's no reason to worry. But if I'm gone for more than three nights, something might be wrong and he should come looking for me."
Remondini says that along with her in-depth knowledge of the area, she uses logic and common sense when searching for a missing person. "I put myself in their shoes and think how they might be thinking when they realize they are lost or in trouble."
In looking for Serajian, who went missing in the area of the Gila Cliff Dwellings, Remondini says she searched along the river, thinking Serajian might have gotten lost and followed the river down. In searching for Dorn, Remondini at one point came within a quarter-mile of the camp Dorn had made in a secluded cave up above the rain- and snow-swollen Gila River.
"Oh, if I hadn't had to turn back at that point I might have found her that day," Remondini laments. She and Dorn have since met and discussed that day, wondering why Dorn didn't hear Remondini's yells or the gunshots she fired into the air. Dorn's conclusion is that she was unable to hear Remondini or the cries of the search and rescue team because the rushing waters of the Gila River below, echoing loudly in the cave, drowned out the sound of most everything.
Remondini says she is ready for the happy day when she finds a person missing in the wilderness in time to rescue them. She goes out on her search missions with a bag loaded with emergency supplies. She opens the bag to display zip-lock bag upon zip-lock bag crammed with cotton balls, syringes, bottles of medicines, what-have-you. She pulls out a feminine sanitary product and smiles.
"A Kotex is still a great bandage when you've got heavy bleeding," she says, a fact most Girl Scouts learn when they earn their first aid merit badge. "I have this emergency blow-up splint for broken limbs," she adds, pulling out another sealed package, "but, honestly, I prefer tying together sticks to make a simple splint. These blow-up ones can cut off circulation. I've never had that problem with a good old-fashioned splint."
Remondini says that in the event of finding a missing person, she would first provide emergency care at the scene, treating for shock, of course.
"I'd check her out to make sure she's okay," she says of her hypothetical rescuee, "then bring her out if possible. I could throw her on the back of my horse if I needed to or call my daughter (the EMT) for help."
It's such comments, perhaps, that cause some official rescue people to raise their eyebrows at Remondini's lone-wolf rescue approach. Though no search and rescue or law enforcement officials actually complain of Remondini compromising a search operation, some express concerns over her methods and even for her own safety.
SAR's Benoist takes issue with Remondini's tendency to continue searching after official efforts have been called off. "We don't call off a search because we're tired or because it's just going on too long," Benoist says. "We call off a search if there are no clues, if there is no new evidence or if we have reason to believe the person is no longer in the area. Even if it has been so long that we know they are probably dead, we keep searching to recover the body. As long as the search is justified and we can find teams to keep searching — these are volunteers, after all — we keep searching, we're out there."
The story about Remondini's horse having a heart attack is a "red flag" to Benoist.
"Everything is important — the equipment, the animals," Benoist says. "We have to take care of our equipment, and on a search and rescue mission, your animals are part of your equipment. Okay, the horse was old, and things do happen to animals, but I just wonder how hard she was pushing that animal. What if the horse had died under her out there? We would have had to go out and rescue her!"
Remondini also has done some procedural things that unsettle the professionals. While Remondini says the official SAR team was aware of her during the Dorn search, she admits that her efforts to find Serajian were at times more covert.
"They told me I couldn't go into an area," she recounts of one trip up to the forestland surrounding the Cliff Dwellings, the area where Serajian had last been seen and was presumed lost. Her husband, however, reminded her that this was national forest — public land — and so she headed out again, this time more quietly.
Lt. Mike Jimenez, a 20-year officer with both state and local police, now working with the Grant County Sheriff's office, says that while Remondini is correct in her assertion that the area is public land, her actions could have destroyed evidence if it had been found that Serajian had met with foul play.
"It becomes a potential crime scene," Jimenez explains. "She could have destroyed or compromised evidence, for sure."
He adds that a civilian presence can also interfere with the search itself. If trackers are involved, helping to find which way a missing person might have wandered, "their extra footprints and the broken branches they cause by passing through an area can throw off the tracker, giving false leads," Jimenez says.
The lieutenant adds that he is as concerned for the civilian searchers as for the missing persons and the integrity of the search itself. "These civilians can become a statistic themselves. . . . It's a strong word, but they can even become a liability," Jimenez says. "We can pull back the search teams for one reason or another, but those civilians can still be out there. Where, you just might not know."
And Jimenez strongly asserts whom he'd rather work with on a search — civilians or recognized search and rescue teams.
"Definitely the trained, official teams," he says. "They are coordinated, they understand how to give specific directions that help us find an area, and they are trained in radio communications. Communicating is key in these kinds of situations."
SAR's Benoist also mentions concerns over potential damage to crime-scene evidence by civilians like Remondini. In the case of Carolyn Dorn, Remondini took possession of the missing woman's car, "to keep it and all her possessions safe," Remondini says.
But Benoist cautions, "With our (SAR) team, we are trained on what to do in a crime-scene situation. It's dangerous when civilians go in. Evidence can be lost or destroyed. A loose cannon like that can endanger everybody. And when you infringe on a crime scene, you mess it up for the family. They cannot have closure."
Benoist also adds a dose of concern for Remondini herself on this score, giving the example of a search gone ugly. "We were searching for a person one time and found out that the person was armed and on drugs," she recalls. "We pulled off all teams immediately and suspended the mission and it became a police matter. If you've got a civilian out there, doing her own thing, she could walk right into an explosive situation, a deadly situation."
Being out of that official communications loop can also have a simply frustrating downside.
Though Serajian's body was found Dec. 21, law-enforcement officials delayed releasing that information to the public until early January so his family members could first be notified of his death. The official search and rescue team, of course, had been called off. But Remondini, outside the official communication loop, kept searching — in bitter cold December weather — after the young man's body had been found. Remondini admits some frustration over that fact.
Benoist says that even if Remondini gathers a group of like-minded volunteers and establishes her own SAR team, there will be hoops to jump through, rules to follow.
"You have to have a charter. You have to be a legal organization and show that you are doing regular training. There are procedures to be followed," Benoist says. "We have the same requirements for everyone, and we pretty much accept everyone who wants to join. We all have to show (training) certificates, attend trainings and meetings and participate in searches.
"We ask that people be reasonable, that they always search with someone else. We don't let anyone go out in the field alone. And they must take along a GPS and a radio that is connected to us. This is just to make it safe for everyone."
But Benoist says that while she has some reservations over Remondini's "go-it-alone" approach, she admires Remondini's determination and skill.
"It's fine to have your own opinions, there's nothing wrong with that," Benoist says. "But you have to compromise to be a part of things. Yes, there are rules and you can't just do what you want, but there are good things you get from being connected. There are benefits to following certain rules.
"Her heart is in a good place," Benoist goes on to say of Remondini, "and she's got some good skills and abilities. If she put those to work with a recognized rescue team, she'd be connected up. She'd be in the loop, getting all the communications and support, too."
Though Jo Remondini may have critics of her methods, she deflects those naysayers and insists there is a value — a need, in fact — for someone willing to do what she does, someone "outside the box."
Asked if she'd consider abandoning her solo efforts to join the established SAR team, she looks off to a corner of the room, then shuts her eyes tight and shakes her head.
"I just can't stop. I can't give up. I can't!" she says. "I think of those families, with their loved ones out there, and I put myself in their shoes. I'd want someone out there every minute looking for my family member."
Insisting she would coordinate with recognized officials on a search mission, Remondini says she thinks nonetheless there's merit in her maverick approach. And she's still looking for a few more people of a similar stripe.
"There's room for me out there, doing what I do," Remondini insists. "I just have to think there's value in this, the fact that I just won't quit. I believe that's worth something."
To contact Jo Remondini about joining her efforts, write
POB 323, Cliff, NM 88028, or call 535-4393.