Cyclist Vanished on Mountain Road — 2 Weeks Later His Helmet Cam Was Found Still Recording

 

Ethan Moore believed in rules. Not the kind written in manuals or posted on signs—but the kind born from instinct, experience, and quiet respect for the mountains he loved. His golden rule, the one he’d never broken, was simple: always tell someone where you’re going. Always.

He had learned that lesson the hard way years before, after a crash during a solo ride left him stranded for six hours with a dislocated shoulder. Since then, he’d been methodical—borderline obsessive—about preparation. His girlfriend, Maya, used to tease him about it, calling him “the most cautious thrill-seeker she’d ever met.” But that was Ethan. He chased the wind, yes, but never without checking the forecast first.

On the morning of April 14, 2024, he did everything right.

The video on his Instagram story showed him standing in the kitchen of his small apartment in Lincoln City, Oregon, sunlight spilling through the blinds. His yellow jersey gleamed, helmet already strapped on, GoPro mounted on top and blinking red. “Nineteen up, nineteen back,” he said into the lens, giving a quick thumbs-up. “See you for dinner.”

That clip would later become both famous and unbearable—the last confirmed image of Ethan Moore alive.

He left home at 7:43 a.m. The morning air was crisp, the kind that hinted at spring but still bit at the skin. Maya kissed him goodbye at the door. She would later recall that he smelled like coffee and sunscreen, that he’d paused before leaving to double-check the camera mount. “For the highlight reel,” he’d said with that half-smile she loved. Then he was gone, pedaling into the mist.

By 8:15 a.m., his Strava tracker showed him fifteen miles inland, climbing steadily. His heart rate, pace, and elevation were all normal. His route—Old Salmon River Road to Cascade Head Lookout—was well-traveled by serious cyclists. It was steep and quiet, with sharp switchbacks and a near-total absence of traffic. Ethan had ridden it more than a dozen times.

But at 9:07 a.m., his GPS signal stopped.

Not flickered, not faded—just ended. One moment there was data, the next there was nothing.

Maya didn’t notice at first. She was teaching a morning yoga class, her phone tucked away in her locker. It was Ethan’s mother, Linda, who noticed. She followed his rides religiously through Strava. “I know it’s silly,” she’d told friends, “but it helps me worry less if I can see where he is.”

That morning, when the line on the map froze mid-route, she felt a weight in her chest before her mind even formed the thought. She called him. Straight to voicemail. She waited five minutes, then called again. Nothing.

By the third attempt, she was shaking. She called Maya. No answer. Finally, she dialed the Lincoln City Police non-emergency line, her voice quivering as she explained that her son’s tracker had gone silent.

The dispatcher was patient. “Sometimes the mountains block the signal,” she said gently. “Let’s give it an hour.”

Linda tried to believe that. She sat on her couch, staring at her phone, whispering prayers to no one in particular. When the hour passed and Ethan’s tracker still hadn’t resumed, she called again. This time, they listened.

By noon, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office had sent two deputies to drive Old Salmon River Road. They scanned the shoulders for tire marks, debris, anything out of place. The road was empty.

By 3 p.m., the search expanded.

Volunteers from the local cycling community arrived in waves. Friends. Strangers. Followers from Ethan’s YouTube channel—“Moore on the Move”—where he documented long-distance rides and posted gear reviews. They came armed with flashlights, drones, and sheer determination.

The woods swallowed them whole.

The Oregon Coast Range is a maze of towering Douglas firs, ferns, and moss that turns everything into a muted cathedral of green. It’s breathtaking—and unforgiving. The forest floor is so thick with undergrowth that you can lose sight of the road within ten steps. If Ethan had veered off the path, his bright yellow jersey might as well have been invisible.

As the sun dipped below the ridge, searchers shouted his name into the dark, their voices echoing off the trees and dying in the distance. They found nothing. Not a shoe print. Not a broken branch.

By nightfall, the temperature had dropped into the forties. The wind cut through the trees like a whisper. Searchers returned to the staging area near the trailhead—cold, exhausted, and unsettled.

Maya stood among them, wrapped in a blanket someone had handed her, staring at the massive map pinned to a folding table. Colored markers dotted the paper, each representing a search team’s path. Her eyes blurred as she traced the roads, the trails, the places they hadn’t yet checked. Every hour that passed without news hollowed her out a little more.

She kept replaying that morning in her head: his thumbs-up, his easy confidence, how ordinary everything had felt. How impossible it seemed that someone could just vanish on a clear day, on a road he knew better than anyone.

Somewhere out there, Ethan’s camera was still recording. She didn’t know that yet. None of them did.

The next two days blurred together—an exhausting cycle of searching, coordinating, and hoping. Search and rescue teams used drones equipped with thermal imaging. Cadaver dogs were brought in, their handlers trudging through mud and brush. They interviewed every driver who’d taken that route that morning.

A woman in a blue Subaru remembered passing a cyclist in a yellow jersey around Mile Marker 12. “He waved,” she said. “Seemed fine.”

A logger hauling timber reported seeing him near the Cascade Head turnoff around 8:55. “Strong pace, steady. He looked good.”

After that, no one had seen him.

The section of road beyond that point was notorious—six miles of steep, twisting switchbacks carved into the side of the mountain. No homes. No cell towers. No pullouts. Just forest. If something had happened to Ethan, it had happened there.

The search teams concentrated their efforts on that stretch, combing every inch. They found wildlife tracks, beer cans, a rusted wrench, but nothing belonging to Ethan Moore.

By day five, fatigue began to show.

The local news picked up the story—Cyclist Missing in Coast Range. His photo appeared on TV and across social media: dark hair, brown eyes, sunburned cheeks, grinning at the camera mid-ride. The image went viral.

Ethan’s YouTube channel filled with comments. Prayers. Theories. People claiming to have dreamed of him. Others speculated about mountain lions, or sinkholes, or foul play. Maya stopped reading them after the first night. She couldn’t bear seeing his name turned into a hashtag.

By day six, the official search began to scale back. The weather had turned—the kind of cold, relentless rain that made drones useless and trails dangerous. The sheriff’s office kept a skeleton crew on standby, but the volunteers dwindled.

Maya stayed. She refused to leave the staging site. She lived on instant coffee and granola bars, sleeping in her car, staring at the empty woods. At night, she would hear the rain tapping on the windshield and imagine Ethan somewhere out there, calling for help.

Ethan’s father, Patrick, flew in from Montana. He and Linda walked the roads themselves, calling his name until their voices cracked. They searched logging roads, ravines, even drainage culverts. Nothing.

By day ten, the case was shifting from rescue to recovery. No one said it out loud, but everyone felt it.

Maya tried to prepare herself for the inevitable. She began drafting an obituary she didn’t believe in. She pictured the apartment without him—the shoes by the door, the helmet that wasn’t there, the half-eaten bag of oatmeal on the counter. Everything frozen in time.

And then, on day fourteen, something changed.

It wasn’t the search teams who found it. It wasn’t the police.

It was a hiker named Joel Pritchard, a 38-year-old mechanic from Tillamook, out walking his dog along a side trail off Forest Road 1861—a narrow path branching away from Ethan’s known route. The area was thick with underbrush, a tangle of ferns and thorny devil’s club.

Joel’s border collie, Finn, darted ahead and started barking at something down in a shallow drainage ditch. Joel called him back, but the dog refused, fixated on a dark shape half-buried in mud.

Pushing through the ferns, Joel expected to find trash—maybe an old tire or a bit of camping gear. What he found instead made his breath catch.

A bicycle helmet. Gray and black. Caked in mud.

Attached to it, still fastened to the mount, was a GoPro camera. Its small red light blinked faintly through the grime.

Joel stared for a long moment, heart hammering. He didn’t touch it. He didn’t need to. Everyone in Lincoln City knew that helmet by now. Everyone had seen the pictures of Ethan Moore, smiling in his yellow jersey, that same camera gleaming on top of his helmet.

Joel stepped back and called 911, his voice trembling. Within an hour, the area was crawling with police and search teams. They taped it off, treated it like a crime scene.

The helmet was remarkably intact. No cracks, no blood. It hadn’t been crushed or thrown. It looked as though it had been placed—or dropped—carefully.

And the GoPro? It shouldn’t have been recording. Not after two weeks in Oregon’s spring rain. The battery should have died within hours. The memory should have been full. Yet the red light was still blinking.

That meant one of two things.

Either someone had replaced the battery… or someone had turned it back on.

As officers cataloged the evidence, no one said the words hanging in the air.

Was it Ethan?

Or was it someone else?

The GoPro was sent to a forensic lab in Portland the same evening. There, under sterile lights, a technician carefully scraped off the mud, dried the casing, and removed the memory card.

What they found on that card—if anything—remained unknown to the public.

But as news of the discovery spread, one thing became clear: the camera had survived, and somewhere inside it might lie the final moments of Ethan Moore’s ride.

And for the first time in two long weeks, everyone had the same question burning in their minds.

What had it recorded?

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Ethan Moore had a rule about solo rides. Always tell someone where you’re going. Always. He’d been cycling competitively since college. And by 31, he’d logged over 15,000 m on his custom carbon frame road bike. He knew the risks. He respected the mountains. And on the morning of April 14th, 2024, he did everything right.

 He posted his route on Straa. He texted his girlfriend, Maya. He charged his helmet cam to full battery. He even packed an extra energy bar, joking in his Instagram story that he was overprepared as usual. The video showed him grinning in his kitchen, yellow jersey bright against the morning light, GoPro already mounted and blinking.

 He gave a thumbs up to the camera. 19 mi up, 19 back. See you for dinner. He never made it home. The Oregon Coast Range in midappril is a study in contradictions. Breathtaking and brutal. The kind of beauty that makes you forget how quickly the weather can turn. How remote the roads become once you leave the highway. Ethan’s planned route, Old Salmon River Road to Cascade Head Lookout, was a local favorite among serious cyclists.

 Steep, winding, and nearly empty of traffic. Just the sound of your own breathing and the hum of tires on cracked pavement. He’d ridden it a dozen times before. This was supposed to be his last big climb before the spring rain settled in for good. He left his apartment in Lincoln City at 7:43 a.m.

 Maya kissed him goodbye at the door. She remembers he smelled like sunscreen and coffee. She remembers the way he adjusted his helmet, double-checking the camera mount. for the highlight reel, he’d said. By 8:15, his Strava app showed him 15 mi inland, ascending steadily, heart rate steady, pace consistent, everything normal. And then at 9:07 a.m.

, his GPS signal stopped. Not gradually, not in an area known for poor reception, just gone. Maya didn’t notice at first. She was at work teaching a yoga class, phone tucked away in her locker. Ethan’s mom, Linda, was the one who saw the notification. She followed all his rides obsessively, worrying in the way only mothers do.

When his tracker went dark mid-root, she felt it immediately. That cold drop in her stomach that tells you something is wrong before your brain catches up. She called him straight to voicemail. She called Maya. No answer. She called the non-emergency line for the Lincoln City Police Department, trying to keep her voice steady, knowing how she must sound, paranoid, overreacting.

But the dispatcher was kind. They told her to wait an hour. Cyclists sometimes stop for breaks, lose signal in the valleys. It happens. She waited. She stared at her phone. She prayed. At 11:00 a.m., when Ethan still hadn’t checked in, she called again. This time they listened. The search started small. Local sheriff’s deputies drove the route in both directions, windows down, looking for any sign of him.

 A reflector, a tire mark, anything. They found nothing. By late afternoon, the search expanded. Volunteers from the cycling community showed up in waves. Friends, strangers, people who had only ever interacted with Ethan through his YouTube channel, where he documented long-distance rides and reviewed gear. They walked the shoulders of old Salmon River Road, calling his name into the dense forest.

 The terrain was unforgiving. Thick underbrush, steep ravines, old growth timber that swallowed sound. If he’d gone off road, if he’d crashed into one of those ravines, he could be 20 ft from the pavement and completely invisible. The thought made everyone search harder, faster. The sun was setting and the temperature was dropping.

 If Ethan was hurt, if he was unconscious somewhere in those woods, time was everything. By nightfall, there was still no sign of him. No bike, no helmet, no phone signal. It was as if he had simply ridden into the mountains and dissolved into the mist. Maya stood at the search staging area wrapped in a blanket someone had given her, staring at the map covered in colored pins and grid lines.

 She kept thinking about that morning, the thumbs up, the smile, how ordinary it all seemed, how impossible it felt that a person could just vanish in broad daylight on a road he’d ridden a hundred times. Someone brought her coffee. She didn’t drink it. She just held the cup, feeling the warmth, trying to anchor herself to something real.

Somewhere out there in the dark, Ethan’s camera was still recording. She didn’t know that yet. None of them did. The first 48 hours were chaos. Search and rescue deployed drones with thermal imaging. They brought in cadaavver dogs. They interviewed every single person who’d driven Old Salmon River Road that day, asking if they’d seen a cyclist in a yellow jersey.

 A few people remembered him. A woman in a Subaru said she’d passed him around Milearker 12. He’d waved. Seemed fine. A logger in a pickup said he’d seen him climbing near the turnoff to Cascade Head. strong pace, no signs of distress, and then nothing. No one else reported seeing him after that. The road beyond that point was a six-mile stretch of isolated switchbacks with no homes, no pullouts, nothing but forest.

 If something had happened to Ethan, it happened there. The search teams focused their efforts on that section, combing every inch. They found deer tracks, coyote scat, old beer cans, but no trace of Ethan Moore. Maya couldn’t sleep. She stayed at the staging area, drinking bad coffee and staring at maps until the lines blurred together.

 People kept telling her to go home, to rest, but the thought of being in their apartment without him was unbearable. His bike shoes were still by the door. His helmet. No, wait. He’d taken his helmet. She kept forgetting. Her mind felt fractured, like she was living in two realities at once. One where Ethan had crashed and was lying hurt somewhere, waiting for them to find him.

 Another where something worse had happened. Something she couldn’t let herself think about. The local news picked up the story on day three. Cyclist missing in Coast Range. His photo, smiling, sunglasses on, wind in his hair, appeared on television. His YouTube subscribers started sharing the story. Within hours, it went regional, then national.

 The comment section of his last video filled with prayers and theories and people saying they’d seen him in dreams, in visions that he was still alive. Maya couldn’t read them. She couldn’t look at his face on the screen. It felt like watching him become a ghost in real time. On day six, the official search was scaled back.

 not abandoned, just scaled back. The resources weren’t unlimited, and the weather was turning. Rain moved in, heavy and cold, turning the forest roads into mud. The volunteer searches continued, smaller groups now, dieards who refused to give up. Ethan’s dad flew in from Montana. He and Linda walked the roads themselves, calling his name until their voices gave out.

 They checked every trail head, every logging road, every place a bike could conceivably end up. Nothing. The statistics were grim. After a week, if someone hasn’t been found, the chances of finding them alive dropped to nearly zero. Everyone knew it. No one said it out loud. Maya started planning a memorial service, even though it felt like betraying him.

 Even though every cell in her body screamed that he was out there somewhere, that this couldn’t be the ending. Not for Ethan. Not like this. And then on day 14, a hiker named Joel Pritchard found the helmet. He wasn’t even searching. He was just out for a walk on a side trail off Forest Road 1861, a narrow dirt track that branched away from the main route Ethan had been on.

 Joel’s dog, a border collie named Finn, started barking at something in the underbrush. Joel called him back, but Finn wouldn’t budge. He was fixated on a spot where the ground dipped into a shallow drainage ditch, the kind of place where runoff collects during heavy rain. Joel pushed through the ferns and devil’s club, annoyed, expecting to find a dead animal or some trash.

 Instead, he found a bicycle helmet, gray and black, caked in mud, and still attached to it, covered in condensation and green algae, was a GPO camera. The record light was still blinking, faint, but blinking. Joel stood there for a long moment, not touching it, his heart hammering in his chest.

 He knew immediately what it was, whose it was. Everyone in Lincoln City knew about Ethan Moore by now. He pulled out his phone, hands shaking, and called 911. Within an hour, the area was swarming with police and search teams. They cordoned off the site, treated it like a crime scene because that’s what it might be. The helmet was intact.

 No cracks, no blood. It hadn’t been thrown there in a crash. It had been placed or dropped. And the camera still recording after 2 weeks meant the battery pack had been replaced or the camera had been turned off and on again. Someone had touched this. Someone had moved it. The question that no one wanted to ask, but everyone was thinking, “Was it Ethan or was it someone else?” They took the camera to a forensic lab in Portland.

The memory card was intact, protected by the waterproof casing. Investigators warned Maya and the family that the footage might not show anything useful. Cameras malfunction, files corrupt, especially after 2 weeks exposed to the elements. But when they opened the files, they found over 9 hours of continuous footage. 9 hours.

 The video started exactly where everyone expected it to. Ethan’s Kitchen. The morning of April 14th. The familiar thumbs up. The cheerful commentary. Then the ride. The camera captured everything in sharp stabilizing detail. The early miles were hypnotic. rolling hills, patches of fog clinging to the roadside, the rhythmic sound of Ethan’s breathing.

 He narrated occasionally, pointing out landmarks. “This is where I ate it last year,” he said at one point, laughing, gesturing to a tight corner. “Almost went over the guardrail.” “Learned my lesson,” he sounded happy, loose, alive. At mile 12, the woman in the Subaru passed him. You could see her wave. Ethan waved back.

 At mile 15, the logger in the pickup rumbled by, giving him plenty of space. Ethan called out a thanks. The road got steeper, his breathing got heavier, but his pace stayed strong. He was in his element, and then at mile 17, something changed. It was subtle at first. Ethan glanced over his shoulder once, then again 30 seconds later.

 A vehicle appeared in the distance behind him, a dark SUV, boxy and nondescript. It stayed back at first, maintaining a steady distance. Ethan didn’t seem concerned. He kept riding. But the SUV didn’t pass. For the next 3 miles, it just followed. Slow, patient, the kind of following that makes your skin prickle. Ethan looked back again.

 His breathing had changed now, not from exertion, but from something else. Tension. awareness. “Come on, dude,” he muttered under his breath. “Pass me or back off.” “The SUV didn’t do either. Instead, it crept closer. Close enough that you could hear the low growl of its engine on the camera’s audio.” Ethan moved farther to the right, practically riding on the shoulder now, giving it every chance to go around. It didn’t.

And then the road curved and for just a moment the SUV disappeared from view. When it came back into frame, it was right behind him, maybe 10 feet. Ethan’s head whipped around. What the hell? His voice was sharp now. Angry, he pedled harder, trying to put distance between them, but the SUV matched his speed.

The road narrowed. No shoulder here, just pavement and a steep drop on one side, dense forest on the other. Ethan was boxed in. The camera caught his hand, reaching for his phone in his jersey pocket. He fumbled with it, nearly dropped it, glanced at the screen. No signal. Of course, he was in the dead zone, the same spot where his GPS had cut out.

 He shoved the phone back and kept writing. And then the SUV accelerated. Not fast, just enough to close the gap. Its front bumper was inches from Ethan’s rear wheel. He shouted something, but the wind and the engine noise drowned it out. He looked back again, and this time you could see his face in the helmet cam’s reflection off his sunglasses. Fear.

 Real, undeniable fear. He tried to speed up, but the climb was too steep. His legs already burning. The SUV revved, and then contact, just a nudge, a tap. But at that speed, on that grade, it was enough. Ethan’s bike wobbled. He fought for control, his hands white knuckled on the handlebars.

 The camera jerked wildly as he swerved, trying to stay upright. For a few seconds, it looked like he might make it. And then the SUV hit him again, harder this time. Deliberate. Ethan’s front wheel twisted and he went down hard, the bike skidding out from under him. The camera showed a blur of asphalt and sky. The sound of metal scraping, Ethan’s grunt of pain, and then silence.

 The camera had landed at an angle, half on the road, half on the gravel shoulder. It was still recording. For a long moment, there was nothing but the sound of the wind and a bird calling somewhere in the trees. Then footsteps, slow, heavy. Someone walked into frame, just their legs, black boots, and dark jeans.

 They stopped next to Ethan’s bike. There was a pause and then a voice, low and calm, almost conversational. You should have stayed on the main road. The boots moved out of frame. A car door opened and closed. The engine started. The SUV drove away. And Ethan, wherever he was, just off camera, didn’t make a sound.

 The helmet sat there recording the empty road for another 6 hours before the battery finally died. When investigators reviewed the footage, they ran the audio through enhancement software. In the background, just before the SUV left, there was another sound, faint, but unmistakable, a groan. Ethan was alive when that vehicle drove away. The investigation exploded overnight.

What had been a missing person case was now an attempted murder or possibly a murder depending on whether Ethan was still alive. The FBI got involved. They analyzed every frame of the footage, ran the audio through spectrographic analysis, tried to enhance the reflection in Ethan’s sunglasses to get a look at the driver. The SUV was the key.

 dark, boxy, possibly a Chevy Tahoe or GMC Yukon, early 2000’s 10’s model based on the body shape. No visible plates in the footage, no distinguishing marks. But it was something. The FBI put out a request to the public. Anyone who owned or had seen a vehicle matching that description on Old Salmon River Road on April 14th needed to come forward.

 The tip line lit up. Hundreds of calls. Most were dead ends. people reporting SUVs from entirely different counties, different states. But a few were promising. A gas station attendant in Otus remembered seeing a dark Tahoe fill up around 7:30 that morning. Paid cash. Driver wore a baseball cap and sunglasses, kept his head down.

 The security footage was grainy, but it showed the vehicle heading east toward the mountains, toward Ethan’s route. The search for Ethan’s body began in earnest. If he’d been alive after the collision, injured and unable to move, he could have crawled into the woods, or he could have been moved. The latter possibility hung over everything like a storm cloud.

 If the driver had come back if they’d finished what they started, Ethan could be anywhere in hundreds of square miles of forest. Cadaavver dogs were brought back in. Search teams combed the area around where the helmet was found, expanding outward in concentric circles. They found his bike three days later, half a mile from the helmet, deep in a ravine.

It had been thrown there. The frame was bent, the wheels twisted, but there was no way it had ended up that far off the road by accident. Someone had carried it there. Someone had tried to hide it. The evidence was piling up, but Ethan himself remained missing. every day without finding him made the likelihood of a recovery, not a rescue, more certain.

 Maya stopped going to the search site. She couldn’t watch anymore, couldn’t listen to the updates that said nothing. She stayed home and watched the helmet cam footage on repeat, trying to understand, trying to find something the police had missed. The public reaction was intense. Ethan’s story went viral in the worst way. True crime.

YouTubers dissected the footage. Reddit threads filled with theories. Road rage, targeted attack, serial predator. Some people claimed the voice on the tape sounded familiar, that they’d heard it before, though no one could say where. Others insisted the SUV was part of a larger pattern, that there had been other accidents on remote roads in Oregon over the past few years.

The police investigated every lead, but nothing connected. The most disturbing theory came from a retired detective who’d worked cold cases in the Pacific Northwest for 30 years. He suggested that the voice, calm, almost friendly, indicated someone who had done this before, someone comfortable with violence, someone who knew those roads well enough to choose the exact spot where there’d be no witnesses, no cell signal, no way for Ethan to call for help.

The thought that this might be a practiced act rather than a spontaneous moment of rage made everything worse. It meant Ethan wasn’t just unlucky. It meant he’d been hunted. 3 weeks after the helmet was found, a break came from an unexpected source. A woman named Karen Deacro called the tip line from her home in Salem, Oregon.

She’d been watching the news coverage and something had clicked. Two years earlier, in the summer of 2022, she’d been hiking near Silverfall State Park when she’d come across a bike helmet lying in the brush near the trail. It was strange, intact, relatively clean, with a camera still attached. She’d turned it in to the park rangers, assuming someone had lost it.

 They’d held it in there lost and found for 90 days, and when no one claimed it, they’d donated it to a local thrift store. Karen hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but now seeing Ethan’s story, the similarity was haunting. She described the helmet, gray and black, same brand as Ethan’s. The rangers confirmed the report.

 They dug through old logs and found the entry. Helmet recovered July 18th, 2022. Camera empty, no memory card. Donated August 2022. Karen couldn’t remember exactly where the helmet had been found, but she walked investigators back to the approximate area. It was a remote section of trail accessible from a forest road that branched off Highway 214, the kind of place where someone could disappear.

The FBI started pulling missing persons reports from 2022. They found him within hours. Marcus Chen, age 29, avid cyclist, went missing during a solo ride on July 16th, 2022. Last seen heading towards Silver Falls. His bike was never found. His case had gone cold within weeks. No witnesses, no evidence, no leads, just another person who’d gone into the woods and never come out.

 Now with Karen’s report and the location of the helmet, everything looked different. Investigators returned to the site and launched a full search. They found Marcus’ bike 2 days later hidden under a pile of brush and deadfall less than a/4 mile from where his helmet had been recovered. The frame was bent. The wheels were destroyed.

And wrapped around the rear derailure, barely visible, was a small fragment of black plastic paint transfer from a vehicle. When they tested it, it matched the chemical composition of paint used on GM vehicles from the 2000s10s. The same type of vehicle that had run Ethan Moore off the road. The same kind of SUV that had been following him through the mountains.

 Two cyclists two years apart. Same method, same result. They weren’t looking for someone who’d made a mistake. They were looking for a killer. The case became a federal priority. The FBI’s behavioral analysis unit built a profile, male, likely between 35 and 55, local to the area, someone who knew the back roads intimately, someone with a deep familiarity with cycling routes, possibly a cyclist himself.

 The attacks weren’t random. They were targeted. The locations were chosen carefully. No witnesses, no cell signal, long stretches of road where a cyclist would be isolated and vulnerable. The profile suggested someone who spent time in these areas who could blend in. A logger, a park ranger, a local outdoorsman, someone whose presence on a remote forest road wouldn’t raise suspicion.

The public was told to be cautious. Solo cyclists were advised to avoid backcountry routes until further notice. The cycling community was paralyzed with fear. Ethan’s YouTube channel became a memorial page. People left comments sharing their own near misses, their own moments of being followed on lonely roads.

 The stories piled up and a picture began to emerge of how vulnerable cyclists really were, how easy it would be for someone to hurt them, how often it might have already happened without anyone noticing. Maya couldn’t let it go. She watched the helmet cam footage every night, listening to that voice. You should have stayed on the main road.

 It played in her head on a loop. She started researching unsolved cyclist disappearances in Oregon, Washington, Northern California. She found more than she expected. 14 cases in the last 8 years. Not all of them matched the profile. Some were clearly accidents. Others had unrelated explanations. But four of them looked disturbingly similar.

 Solo male cyclists, remote locations, no bodies recovered. bikes found later. Always damaged, always hidden. She compiled everything into a document and sent it to the FBI. They thanked her politely, but didn’t seem optimistic. Without physical evidence linking the cases, it was all speculation. But Maya knew. She felt it.

 Ethan hadn’t been the first. He might not even be the last. Somewhere out there, someone was driving those roads, watching for cyclists, waiting for the perfect moment. And until he was caught, no one was safe. In June 2024, 2 months after Ethan disappeared, a hiker found human remains in the forest near Cascade Head. The area had been searched before, but this was farther out in a steep ravine choked with undergrowth.

 The remains were badly decomposed, scattered by animals, but dental records confirmed what everyone already feared. It was Ethan Moore. The medical examiner determined that he’d died from blunt force trauma to the head and chest, consistent with being struck by a vehicle. But there were other injuries, too.

 Fractures that suggested he’d been moved after the initial collision, dragged, or carried. The timeline was devastating. Based on the condition of the remains and the ambient temperature data, Ethan had likely survived for several hours after the crash. He’d been alive, alone in those woods, unable to move or call for help.

 And then he died slowly while search teams combed areas just miles away. The thought of how close they’d come, how many times they’d walked past him was unbearable. Maya didn’t attend the second funeral. She couldn’t. She stayed home and watched the videos Ethan had made, the rides he’d filmed, the races he’d won. She tried to remember him that way, not as a voice groaning in the background of a helmet cam, not as bones in the forest, just Ethan, smiling in his yellow jersey, alive.

 The investigation is still open. The FBI has enhanced photos of the SUV, released them to the public. They’ve interviewed hundreds of people. They’ve followed up on every credible tip, but the driver remains unidentified. The vehicle has never been found. Marcus Chen’s case has been reopened. His family finally given answers after 2 years of not knowing.

But there’s no closure, just more questions, more fear. The helmet cam footage has never been released to the public. It’s too graphic, too invasive. But excerpts have been shown to select media outlets, and the story has become a touchstone in discussions about cyclist safety, about the violence that can erupt on empty roads, about the predators who hide in plain sight.

Ethan’s final ride, captured in 9 hours of footage, is now evidence in a murder investigation that may never be solved. The camera kept recording long after he stopped moving. It documented his last moments, his fear, his pain. It gave investigators everything they needed to know what happened.

 But it couldn’t tell them who did it, and it couldn’t bring him back. Maya moved away from Lincoln City 6 months after Ethan’s body was found. She couldn’t stay in the apartment, couldn’t drive past the roads he used to ride. She packed up his things, his bike shoes, his jerseys, his helmets, and donated most of it to a youth cycling program in his name.

 She kept one thing, the GoPro from his kitchen, the one he’d used for casual videos. She charges it sometimes, turns it on, and watches old footage of him goofing around, showing off new gear, talking about his favorite roots. In one video, he’s sitting in their living room, camera propped on the coffee table, talking about why he loves cycling.

 “It’s the freedom,” he says, smiling that easy smile. “Just you, the road, and the mountains. Nothing else matters out there.” Maya pauses the video on his face. She thinks about that freedom, about how quickly it can be taken away, about the person who’s still out there driving those same roads, maybe watching for the next cyclist in a bright jersey, maybe already planning.

 The helmet cam is in an evidence locker in Portland. The case file is still active and somewhere in the forests of the Oregon coast range, the question remains, who was driving that SUV and how many others are out there waiting to be Sound.