Missing teenager Connerjack Oswalt who vanished three years ago is found shivering outside gas station 700 miles away

AFTER three years of searching, a missing teen was found 700 miles away from where he vanished in California.

Authorities identified a young man with autism sleeping in a gas station in Utah as missing boy Connorjack Oswalt last week.

Summit County Sheriff’s OfficeConnorjack Oswalt went missing in September of 2019[/caption]

Summit County Sheriff’s OfficeSummit County police found Oswalt outside of a gas station in the cold[/caption]

Sheriff Justin Martinez said that Oswalt, now 19, had been shivering in the cold outside of a gas station’s convenience store in Summit County when deputies found him.

In the weeks leading up to the law enforcement’s intervention on April 9, the sheriff’s office stated in a Facebook post that they had received and responded to numerous reports of a homeless man in the area pushing around a shopping cart.

Upon their arrival at the gas station in the greater Park City area, deputies offered the man to sit inside one of the officer’s patrol vehicles, where he could warm up as they looked into the man’s identity.

“Through past interactions and the Saturday interaction, it was clear to deputies that the man communicated differently,” the sheriff’s office said in the post, including an autism awareness hashtag.

Officers eventually persuaded Oswalt to let them take his fingerprint, which led to them finding he had a previous arrest warrant.

A dispatcher then looked through pages on the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website, where they found a missing poster for Oswalt put out by his desperate parents.

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System says that Oswalt had been diagnosed with autism in 2014 and that he had a “history of running away.”

The teenager went missing in September 2019 from Clearlake, California, which is roughly an 11-hour drive from Summit County.

When deputies contacted Oswalt’s mother, she was able to confirm his identity by a birthmark on his neck.

Oswalt’s stepfather, Gerald Flint, and grandfather drove the four hours from their current home in Idaho Falls to Park City to identify him in person and be reunited.

“Everyone in the room was in tears. They went above and beyond, put hours of work,” Flint said to KCRA.

“They could have dismissed it, but they didn’t and that made all the difference in the world.”

Once Flint identified Oswalt by his mugshot, he called the mother to relay the emotional news.

In a video obtained by CNN, Oswalt’s mother can reportedly be heard emotionally receiving the news of her son’s return.

“My sweetheart’s alive,” Suzanne Flint, Oswalt’s mother, is recorded saying while sobbing.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the room,” Martinez told CBS. “They’ve been reunited with this individual they haven’t seen for three years when he was 16. He’s now 19.”

Oswalt’s family is expecting his return home soon, as he was still receiving care and resources in Utah as of Saturday night.

Though Summit County officers reported that the boy had appeared to have been living on the streets there for about two weeks, his whereabouts for the past two years remain unclear.

Summit County Sheriff’s OfficeOswalt was diagnosed with autism in 2014[/caption]