A 74-year-old Katy man who suffers from diabetes has been missing since Tuesday morning after he walked into a densely wooded area off Katy Hockley Road to retrieve a downed aircraft and never came back out. Search crews worked through the night and resumed again Wednesday, but as of the latest updates, Ronald Nowak had not been located.
What Happened Near the R/C Club
Nowak was last seen around 11 a.m. Tuesday at the Northwest Houston R/C Club in Katy, according to Texas EquuSearch, which says he walked into the tree line to retrieve his lost model airplane and did not reappear. A separate account attributed to the HCSOTexas
account describes the incident differently, stating that two men were reportedly operating a drone when it crashed into a wooded area near the 11100 block of Katy Hockley, and that one of the men, age 74, went missing after circling back to try to locate the missing part. The two accounts have not been reconciled, and it remains unclear whether they describe the same object or the same sequence of events.
Texas EquuSearch says Nowak has diabetes, a detail that has added urgency to the search given the heat and dense terrain. He was last seen wearing dark-colored shorts, a light gray T-shirt, a light cream-colored cap with a dark blue rim, and light-colored tennis shoes, the organization said. The Harris County Sheriff's Office is listed as the law enforcement agency handling the case.
Search Stretches Into a Second Day
Per the HCSOTexas account, an initial search Tuesday was conducted without success, prompting the sheriff's office and its partners to keep working the case into the night. The Houston Chronicle reported that search efforts were ongoing deep into the night until about 3 a.m. Wednesday and resumed roughly six hours later. On Wednesday, HCSO detectives resumed search efforts, joined by Precinct 5 deputies and Texas EquuSearch, according to the same social media statement.
Crews say they have a strong starting point but a difficult landscape to search. The Chronicle's report notes that searchers got a very good last known location where Nowak actually entered the woods, but the terrain is pretty thick coverage — a combination that has slowed efforts to cover the ground on foot. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez leads the agency, which the account describes as the largest sheriff's office in Texas, based in Houston.
How Drones Have Helped Find Others
Searches like this one increasingly lean on drone technology, even when the outcome of this particular case remains unknown. In Minneapolis, police have used drones to locate people quickly in wooded terrain; one drone found a missing 82-year-old man named Bob Stewart just nine minutes after launch, following a ground search by officers and a K-9 unit that had already stretched past three hours, according to CBS News Minnesota. The operator in that case spotted Stewart as an anomaly through the vegetation, which let officers on the ground move straight to him.
Other Texas departments have used similar tools. Sherman police train officers to fly drones for documenting crime scenes and fatality accidents, and also to locate missing people, according to KTEN, which reported that Sherman's drone team helped Grayson County deputies locate a man with Alzheimer's and return him safely to his family. In Michigan, Calhoun County deputies have used a drone equipped with an infrared FLIR camera since 2018; in one case reported by WOOD TV8, the thermal camera detected a missing 73-year-old man's body heat in a swampy area, though he was later found in waist-deep water and died after being taken to a hospital.
How to Help
Anyone with information about Nowak's whereabouts is asked to contact the Harris County Sheriff's Office at (281) 221-6000 or Texas EquuSearch at (281) 309-9500. The HCSOTexas account has also reminded the public that its social media channels are not monitored around the clock and that anyone with an emergency should call 911 instead.
