The body of an American university student who vanished during a family vacation in Japan has been found in a mountainous area outside Kyoto, his mother announced on Saturday in a Facebook post.
James Higginbotham, 20, was discovered by a volunteer search-and-rescue group, according to his mother Nancy Higginbotham. A cause of death had not been made available at the time of the announcement.
“Our family is heartbroken,” she wrote. “The grief we feel is impossible to put into words.”
Higginbotham, an engineering student at Auburn University from Alabama, was last seen leaving a Kyoto train station on May 29. His phone went dark later that night, with location services switched off — cutting off the tracking his mother had been using through the Life360 app to follow his movements. His parents believed he had been heading to a nearby hiking trail. Nancy Higginbotham had previously told Reuters she thought her son may have “needed space.”
The family had travelled to Japan to celebrate the high school graduation of James’s younger brother when he went missing.
Japanese authorities launched an initial search that stretched across three days and mobilised around 100 police officers, K-9 units, and helicopters, but found no trace of him, CNN reported. It was ultimately a volunteer rescue group that located his remains in the rugged terrain outside the city.