Volunteer search crews gathered before dawn yesterday to renew the hunt for Amy Hillyard, the Oakland mother and coffee shop co-owner who has now been missing for more than four months. The search began at 7:30 a.m. with teams canvassing the Redwood Regional Park area, assisted by the East Bay Regional Park District, as organizers push to keep the case active after a summer of dead ends.
Hillyard, a co-owner of Farley's coffee shop on Grand Avenue in Oakland, was last seen by friends and family on March 25, according to KTVU FOX 2. Surveillance video captured her leaving her Oakland home that day, and organizers say the renewed search follows a recent review of that footage. Per Newsweek, the 52-year-old had been dropped off at a BART station by her husband to attend a therapy appointment and returned to her Oakland home before leaving behind her phone, wallet and personal belongings.
Volunteers were instructed to meet at the Richard C. Trudeau Training Center on Skyline Boulevard before fanning out into the regional park, a shift from the urban neighborhoods that dominated the early search. In the days after Hillyard vanished, police calls for neighborhood surveillance footage focused heavily on Oakland's Cleveland Heights, Crocker Highlands, Lakeshore and Lake Merritt neighborhoods, according to a Facebook post from Criminally Obsessed.
Police Say No Evidence of Foul Play
The Oakland Police Department designated Hillyard an “at-risk” missing person because she was taking mental health medication, though investigators have said they found no evidence of foul play or criminal abduction, as reported by CBS News. The department's Missing Persons Unit, which leads the public investigation, handles roughly 1,500 missing persons cases every year, the outlet notes.
The case took a significant turn in June when private investigators hired by Hillyard's family re-analyzed surveillance video from Dimond Park that authorities had initially believed showed her. The investigators concluded the person in that footage was not Hillyard, according to Berkeley Patch. Dimond Park had been an early focus for volunteer searchers and police search dogs before the correction.
Family Turns to Private Investigators and a Bigger Reward
With official leads stalling, Hillyard's family retained the private investigative firm Search Investigations, funded through community GoFundMe contributions, to deploy drones, search dogs and search warrants for unreleased video footage, the same report states. Her husband, Chris Hillyard, raised the reward for information leading to her location to $25,000 in late June, up from the $10,000 he had initially offered in April.
The reward increase coincided with a community gathering marking three months since Hillyard's disappearance, held on June 27 at the Pergola at Lake Merritt — a spot where she frequently walked with family and friends. Lake Merritt has served as the site of multiple vigils and awareness walks throughout the search.
Hillyard and her husband are known well beyond Grand Avenue in the Bay Area small business community. In addition to Farley's East in Oakland, the couple co-owns the original Farley's coffee shop in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood, which has operated as a neighborhood gathering space for more than three decades. Chris Hillyard spoke with Hoodline back in 2017 about a 1,000-square-foot Grand Avenue expansion that added kitchen, seating, and catering space to the Oakland café.
Yesterday's push into Redwood Regional Park marks the latest expansion of ground search efforts, which have steadily moved from the residential streets surrounding Lake Merritt into the region's wooded parkland. Organizers have not said whether the search turned up any new leads, and Hillyard's whereabouts remain unknown more than four months after she disappeared.
