OREM — Orem officials are now sure that a man found working on a ranch in Texas is an Orem man who disappeared more than two decades ago.
"His identity has been confirmed," said Orem Police Lt. Keldon Brown. "His attorney's identification of him in my mind is sufficient. He's talking to his client about having been in Orem at the center in the time period, and all that is true and correct."
Keri Bray was 27 in 1986 when he walked away from the Lake Crest Development Center in Orem without telling anyone where he was going.
He only said he wanted to be a cowboy.
And now officials and family members know that for the past 21 years, he's been working at a ranch in Texas.
The ranch is where Bray recently crashed a tractor, starting an insurance investigation that led to his identification by Orem police.
And rather than send in more officers to ask Bray about his identity, they felt it would be better if his attorney talked to him, so he wouldn't get scared and run.
"I'm so thankful to God that he's alive," said Bray's adopted sister, La Ree Bray Stofleth. "The police told me he did well and made contributions to the ranch. It's great for me to see that he had lived for 21 years on his own when we didn't think, we didn't give him enough credit that he could live on his own."
Bray was adopted as a baby and at age 5, Stofleth said, family members began to notice that Bray was "slow."
"I don't think he was ever diagnosed," Stofleth said. "My parents just loved him the way he was and tried to help him and be there for him."
Bray's adoptive parents died when he was still a child, and although there weren't many family members who knew and loved Bray, Stofleth said she never stopped worrying about and loving him.
"I cared about him like a brother, that's the way I was raised," Stofleth said.
And when she heard he had run away, Stofleth said she did everything she could to help find him.
"Every time we went anywhere, we took posters of Keri ... and stuck them up," she said. "It was kind of like our ritual. I didn't know what else to do. I didn't have a lot of funds to be going hunting for him. I just kind of left it to them."
They — the Orem police — did their best to follow a case with no leads, said former Orem Police Lt. Denton Johnston who handled the investigation.
They would get calls occasionally from officials in Texas saying they had found a dead body, and could it possibly be Bray?
But the bodies never matched, and the case just hung around, unsolved for many years, Johnston said.
"After so long ... and you don't know where they are, you kind of assume since they were (mentally) 10 years old and couldn't live by themselves, that they're dead," Stofleth said.
After years of faithfully checking with the Orem Police Department, she stopped calling, having heard nothing and assuming the worst.
The fact that Bray is alive and doing well is a welcome message for Stofleth. Although she is not sure about a possible reunion, she emphasized her love and concern for Bray.
"We did care about him," Stofleth said. "We did. We very much did."
E-mail: sisraelsen@desnews.com