It was the winter of 2021 when Philbert Shorty’s family found his abandoned car stuck in the mud outside the small community of Tsaile near the Arizona-New Mexico state line. “We knew something happened from the get-go,” said his uncle, Ben Shorty. “We couldn’t find any answers.”
Family members reported the 44-year-old man missing. And for the next two years, they searched — hiking through remote canyons on the Navajo Nation, placing advertisements on the radio and posting across social media in hopes of unearthing any clues.
