HILLSDALE, Kan. — It's been two weeks since Olathe resident, Jordan Yust, went missing following a mental health crisis.
On March 3, 2025, Yust made comments of self harm and drove his family vehicle south to Miami County, Kansas. North of 247th and 69 highway, his car was spotted with the flashers on. Only Jordan's wallet was left behind, his watch and phone were left at home.
Authorities from multiple jurisdictions have deployed numerous resources to assist in the search effort. Olathe Police Department is in charge of the investigation, assisted by Miami County Sheriff's Office.
No luck.
"It's really difficult because there's a lot of things going through your head like, is he alive? Is he not alive?" explained Jeff Maxwell, Jordan Yust's brother-in-law. "You know, one way or another, we want to find Jordan."
Last week, the Miami County Sheriff's Office conducted a search with canine units, following the scent of a personal item that was believed to belong to Yust.
The search was unsuccessful in locating Yust, covering 4,000 acres, according to a Miami County Sheriff's Office Facebook Post.
"I think that's probably what's, what's keeping the thing alive," Maxwell said. "The dog... I think helped give us hope that we have a certain area to at least target a lot of our searches. Before, we had no idea."
With the help of social media, a Facebook group has driven the families search with the help of neighbors, friends, and people they don't even know.
"It's been really amazing to see the support," added Maxwell. "It goes to show that the type of person Jordan was."
On Sunday, family members, friends, and other community members conducted an aerial search using drones.
According to Maxwell, Sunday's search was organized by Jordan's friends who worked with him at Garmin.
They supplied a staging location, a command center trailer, with food and electricity.
On the wall, a map with black, white, and red one mile increment squares that show the search area.
"We basically broke these into kind one-mile grids for people to go and hand out flyers," Maxwell explained. "We’re kind of reusing the map, this white all here is where we kind of start gridding for drone searches based on the most recent information we have from law enforcement about where he could potentially be.”
Heavy attention on Facebook caught the eye of four drone pilots associated with Skydio.
"We just so happen to be training in town this week," said John Smith, a Senior Technical Trainer with Skydio. "We saw a Facebook notification and we're like, all right, let's cancel training and let's go help these guys out.”
Skydio is based out of San Mateo, California and was founded in 2014 with the goal of making "Drones as First Responders".
"This is actually one of the cases that we will go out and train police on," added Smith.
The four men are veteran and former law enforcement from all over the country. Smith, resides in Gardner, Kansas.
"It's not just me, it's everybody. If there's a hurricane, you can guarantee there's somebody from Skydio there," he said. "It's incredible, it's touching, and it's pretty emotional. You see the signs everywhere. 'Please come home.' So we're just really hoping we can come out here and help them. At the end of the day, that's it.”
Skydio's drones use a T-Mobile cellular service to live feed a video to the command center using color and thermal imaging. If the pilots pick up on a heat abnormality, it gets logged for that area to be searched.
Smith added, "Our big focus is we're trying to get an appropriate zoom level where we could identify what a person is."
There were no images captured that could lead to Yust.
There were a number of drone pilots launching drones in the area Sunday. Aside from the work in the air, searchers on the ground were doing their part.
"I feel like he [Jordan Yust] just is going through a hard time and we want to see him come home and he's got a lot of people that love him," shared Aimee Bury a community searcher from Overland Park. "I've been up at all different times of night. I just felt really burdened to come out and drive and pray.”
Bury says, she has a few friends that know the Yust family, but does not have a connection herself. KSHB 41 stopped her as she was driving near the drone search area.
"I can just imagine It being one of my own siblings. And so my heart just really goes out to them in that way," she said. "I hope that he doesn't feel shame or anything like that. I want him to hopefully feel and understand that he's loved and that he'll have a moment of clarity and hopefully come out of wherever he is.”
Maxwell and his family are asking residents in Miami County, Kansas to survey their property, surveillance video, and report anything out of the ordinary to law enforcement.
Since KSHB 41's initial story on the search for Jordan Yust theFacebook group has added over 2,000 members.
This is a developing story and as more information becomes available, we will update you.
