Everybody believed he is gone until this American student was found doing a noble career in North Korea.
An American student who was believed to be gone since 2004 was reported to be teaching his mother tongue, English, in North Korea.
David Louis Sneddon was a 24-year-old student of Brigham Young University when he mysteriously disappeared in Yunnan Province in China in 2004.
Sneddon was believed to have fallen and died while hiking the Tiger Leaping Gorge Trail in Yunnan. However, his body was not found.
After some time, Sneddon was reported by South Korea’s Family Union to have been kidnapped and brought to NorthKorea to become an English tutor to then-heir Kim Jong-un. He is now living in Pyongyang, with North Korean wife and two children.
Sneddon might have been targeted (kidnapped) because of his fluency in Korean language which he developed when he as a Mormon missionary in South Korea.
After the discovery, the United States Department of State announced that they would launch a rescue operation to take Sneddon back to the US from North Korea.
Sneddon’s parents, Kathleen and Roy, were interviewed on the radio channel “Voice of America”, after receiving a call from a US citizen living near South Korea’s capital, Seoul. The caller said his wife who is a former defector, had friends who noticed that Sneddon looked similar to an American teaching English in Pyongyang.
Kathleen said, “We just knew in our heart that he was alive, so we had to keep fighting”.
Now, the Sneddon couple is all out in their campaign for the passing of a joint resolution in the House of Representatives of the US which directs the government to investigate the alleged abduction of their son.
Several years ago, Roy and James, David’s brother, visited Yunnan province in hopes of finding the missing kin. They even created a website and a Facebook page dedicated to finding Sneddon.