> It's possible that his family recognized him and just hasn't bothered to say anything publicly. Maybe he burned bridges in his previous life and folks would rather let it go than deal with interviews, etc.
From the article:
> His family has not responded to requests for comment
> “There’s a reason no one reported him missing,” said a former roommate in Baton Rouge
> an intelligent and troubled man who often struggled with personal relationships, particularly with his family
I wouldn't necessarily read too much into that. Sadly there have apparently been similar cases where family members have been harassed by anonymous internet users for not reporting their adult family members missing. Apparently law enforcement is now giving families a heads up during the identification process and allowing them to retain some level of anonymity. I've seen this specifically cited as the reason "Lyle Stevik"[0]'s name was never made public.
Your comment speculates that they intentionally chose to withhold information. The article tells a different story of someone who had enough people who knew and cared about him, but who also knew him as someone who lived in such a way that due to it not being unusual to go long stretches without contact with others, his disappearance and death could easily go unnoticed. And of course, when people did realize the dead hiker was theirs, they came forward. It's the whole reason this article was able to be written in the first place. These are two different pictures that aren't especially compatible. (It's bad enough to participate in those types of speculation fests, but even worse that at the moment the fog lifts and it should be approached with a newly sober attitude, you instead show up to pimp out your (wrong) theory.)
Being wrong most of the time in this cases is normal. Speculation is based in the limited set of data available at a given point. As the data slowly improves, the hypothesis will be replaced by better explanations. Is an iterative process.
If we see for example an old fainted abdominal scar, without more additional data, the correct explanation would be to assume that it was made (or closed) by a surgeon. This will be the correct explanation in, lets say, 80% of the real cases. An attack or an accident would be the next logical candidates. People deliberately shooting themselves in the belly are really rare events so we should not choose this explanation in the first iterations without discarding the more probable candidates first.
After discarding the other options, a case of mental issues and anorexia, maybe followed by eating too much [1] in a too fragile body would explain it
[1] despite his extreme condition, he was eating and drinking, as the autopsy reveals.
... but after discarding the other options, there is still another remaining candidate that links together and explains practically all little strange details that seemed out of place in this history, and this candidate is prostate cancer.
