Three Nevada County Sheriff's Office deputies spent a late-August night bouncing down dark dirt trails near Nevada City, chasing GPS coordinates to find a missing American Red Cross volunteer whose car had gone dead on the edge of a cliff. They found him at around 2 a.m., stranded with his disabled vehicle off Lazy Dog Road, closing out a search that began after his team reported him missing at about 9:22 p.m., following nearly 12 hours without contact.
Deputies Bryce Bouchard, Charles Raban and Kayla Ramos have now been formally recognized by the California Gold Country Region of the American Red Cross for the rescue, according to YubaNet. The volunteer had been transporting supplies from Yuba City to Reno, Nevada on Aug. 28 when he became lost and never reached his destination, per the same outlet. As CBS Sacramento reports, the volunteer was not local to the area, which only complicated efforts to retrace his route once he stopped responding.
The volunteer's team grew worried after hours of silence and contacted the sheriff's office at approximately 9:22 p.m. to file a missing-person report, roughly 12 hours after last hearing from him, YubaNet reported. Deputies quickly discovered a complicating detail: the volunteer had left his cell phone behind at a Yuba City hotel, cutting off the easiest way to reach him or trace his location in real time.
Tracking a Vehicle Through the Dark
With the phone a dead end, deputies instead tracked the vehicle's own GPS coordinates, which pointed them toward a remote, rugged stretch off Lazy Dog Road in Nevada City — terrain unlikely to be mistaken for the route to Reno. Bouchard, Raban and Ramos began search efforts that evening and pushed into the night, the report notes, using the department's Jeep Wrangler to navigate unpaved dirt trails that a standard patrol vehicle couldn't handle.
The search stretched for hours before deputies finally located the volunteer and his disabled vehicle on the side of a cliff at approximately 2 a.m. the next morning.
Red Cross Returns to Say Thank You
Weeks later, representatives from the American Red Cross came to the Nevada County Sheriff's Office in person to thank the three deputies directly and hand them certificates of appreciation. Nuriddin Ziyadinov, the organization's regional chief executive, credited the deputies' urgency with the rescue's outcome: “Your swift response, dedication, and commitment to public safety were instrumental in ensuring a safe outcome.”
The in-person visit underscored how seriously the Red Cross treated the case, sending leadership to the sheriff's office rather than issuing recognition from a distance. For a volunteer who had been unreachable for nearly half a day in unfamiliar terrain, the overnight search by Bouchard, Raban and Ramos turned what began as a missing-person report into a story with a resolution worth celebrating months later.
