Family finds son’s body

A father organized a search that found his son’s body Sunday in Coeur d’Alene after an official squad of searchers on air, land and water previously failed to find anything.

The Coeur d’Alene Police had combed the wooded 135 acres on Tubbs Hill for Tyson Frazier last Monday. Searchers on horse, foot, motorcycle and ATVs didn’t find the missing man whose car was discovered near Tubbs Hill with a suicide note inside. Two marine deputies had secured the shoreline and a helicopter crew saw nothing from the air.

The 21-year-old man had been missing since Sept. 7 when he failed to return to the Kootenai County Jail from his work-release job. He was a methamphetamine addict, said his father.

After the initial search failed, officials had concluded that Frazier staged his disappearance to avoid jail.

“I was fairly certain that my son would not leave a facetious suicide note to plan an escape,” said Tyson’s father, Skip Frazier, on Sunday.

On Sunday, 200 civilians showed up at the hill at noon with Frazier’s father and within three hours someone found the Idaho man on the brushy north side near the softball field. It’s likely he hanged himself, said people at the scene.

“It’s miserable,” Frazier said, referring to the day’s events.

Sgt. Christie Wood, spokeswoman for the Coeur d’Alene Police Department, said the official search team gave their all for a difficult search. She added that Sunday’s civilian effort was impressive.

“It’s just great there are people in the community who will step up and do this,” Wood said.

“It was a real lesson in human connection,” Frazier said, who expected half as many people to show up.

Frazier’s daughter did ask the authorities on hand to be more humane in their future determinations, Frazier said. Frazier said he thought it was possible that the police, who often see the worst of human nature, jumped to the worst conclusion about his son – that he staged a suicide to escape jail.

Before the day started, Frazier already knew all the possible outcomes were negative. Either his son had hoodwinked the officials and he was out bingeing or crashing, or he was dead.

“Either way it’s an awful outcome,” Frazier said.

The search started at noon, and at 2:20 p.m., rescuers began calling out to one another, saying “Leave the hill,” an agreed-upon signal that a body had been found. They called the authorities who retrieved Frazier.

“Once they removed the body, they came and talked to us,” Frazier said. “They were very courteous about the whole thing.”

Frazier said he discovered his son smoking marijuana at the age of 14 or 15.

“I was pretty distressed by that,” Frazier said.

At 18, his son tried meth.

“We did interventions with him,” Frazier said.

His son spent two weeks at Kootenai Medical Center getting clean. He relapsed. He then did six months of rehabilitation in Cottonwood, Idaho, which kept him sober for nine months.

“I don’t even know what the trigger was that he started using again,” Frazier said. “He was working, going to school (at North Idaho College). He was a good father (to a 5-year-old son), very responsible. He bought a new car. But once he relapsed, it was hell.”