Yoga teacher appears to have gone for a run on 8 May. She has not been seen since

More than 100 volunteers joined professional trackers and search dogs to comb a dense forest in the north of the Hawaiian island of Maui on Friday, looking for Amanda Eller, a 35-year-old physical therapist and yoga teacher who went missing 10 days ago. Police said more than a dozen detectives were following up all leads.

“It’s just so easy to get anything lost in this terrain, in this environment,” Eller’s father, John, said on Thursday night. “The terrain, the vegetation, the downed trees, the crevices, the holes in the ground, the ravines. You could walk right past somebody and not even know they’re there.”

From a “base camp” in the Makawao forest reserve, John Eller and the rest of a mostly volunteer team are spearheading a huge search in hopes of finding Eller alive.

On 8 May, Eller had the day off. Her boyfriend, Benjamin Konkol, got home to find Eller wasn’t there and had not texted or called. At 7.21 am the next day, Konkol called police and reported her missing. He gave police a list of areas Amanda liked to frequent. One was the Makawao forest reserve, where police found her white Toyota RAV4 in the parking lot. Konkol is not a suspect. Police said he had passed a polygraph test and been “cleared”.

Eller’s car key was found under one of the car’s tires and her purse was on the front passenger floorboard with her cellphone, wallet, ID and credit cards inside. A backpack and a full water bottle were found on the front passenger seat. Her running shoes were missing from both her home and the car, leading police to believe Eller could have gone for a run in the park.

Surveillance video showed Eller running errands in the nearby town of Haiku, where she lives, in the hours before she went missing. She purchased tea and a PowerBar, then mailed a Mother’s Day package from the post office. Another video showed her driving toward the exit of the grocery store parking lot but it is unknown where she went after that, or if someone could have been with her. An off-duty fire department employee told police they saw Eller’s car in the forest parking lot two hours later, in the spot where it would later be found.

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In a press conference on Thursday, police said that while they were throwing all available resources at the investigation, they still classified it as a missing person case.

“When we looked around the car we did not see any sign of struggle or anything that would indicate foul play,” said Maui’s assistant police chief, Victor Ramos.

Police said 15 detectives were working on the case, plus half a dozen other employees. The department has received 150 phone calls with tips and is even following up on leads given by psychics who believe they can help find Eller.

Police are also looking for owners of cars reported to be in the area around the time Eller went missing, including an early 2000s model, medium blue Dodge Ram pickup truck that was parked next to Eller’s car around noon and a white Toyota van driven by an older man with two dogs. Police are also hoping to speak with a Caucasian couple in their 30s or 40s seen hiking in the area at the time.

At the family press conference last Sunday, Sarah Haynes, a friend of Eller and Konkol who helped lead the original search effort, acknowledged that Eller could have been lost or injured in the forest, or could have met with foul play and now be somewhere else on the island.

“If you have her,” she said, “if she’s alive … we don’t want you, we want her. Drop her anywhere. Let her go.”

A $10,000 reward for information leading to Eller’s return has been offered by the family, linked to the CrimeStoppers anonymous tip hotline.

Eller’s family said they believed that if anyone could survive being lost or injured in the vast forest, it would be Eller. As a doctor of physical therapy and a spiritual person who cares about clean living, her mother said, “She’s very strong. Her whole constitution has been fine-tuned. That’s going to serve her well in this particular situation.”

“We’re still hopeful,” John Eller said, as the sun set and volunteer crews began leaving the forest after another day of searching. “The guys that have experience in this [say] you’ve got weeks [during which a person can survive alone]. If you can get water, you’ve got weeks.”

On Saturday, volunteer searchers plan to go into the forest again, with the help of search dogs, heat-seeking drones and GPS technology.