Sneddon apparently was not mentioned during the one-on-one talks in Hanoi.

“Of course I want an answer to what happened,” said Jenny Sneddon Reuel, David’s younger sister. They are numbers 10 and 11 out of 11 children, and were close growing up.

“I lost a confidant and a best friend. That longing never goes away. There are moments when I will do something or hear a song with that reminds me of Dave,” she said.

In the summer of 2004, after completing his junior year at BYU, Sneddon, then 24, went to Beijing to get a jump-start on the Chinese language class he planned to take in his senior year. He had already completed a two-year Mormon mission to South Korea and had learned Korean.

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With his summer classes done, Sneddon and George Bailey, a friend from BYU, went to see some of the tourist sites of China.

Then Bailey returned to the United States, while Sneddon continued onward to Tiger Leaping Gorge, a scenic area in Yunnan in southern China. He hiked through the gorge and ate several times at a Korean restaurant in Shangri-La. And then he disappeared.

His family searched for him but came up with nothing. The State Department and Chinese authorities eventually concluded that he must have slipped into the gorge and fallen into the river, although his body was never found.

“We both felt so safe in China,” Bailey said, recounting the questions he has asked himself over the years. “I went through survivor’s guilt. In the intervening years, I’ve learned to forgive myself. I couldn’t know that he would be in danger and certainly not that the North Koreans might take him.”

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In 2011, Chuck Downs, a former Pentagon officer who worked on North Korea issues and went on to lead the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, heard about Sneddon’s disappearance. Downs had worked on abduction-related cases — North Korea had made a habit of abducting people, particularly Japanese citizens, in the 1970s and 1980s — and became convinced that Sneddon had been abducted by North Korea.

He went missing barely a month after Pyongyang released Charles Jenkins, an American soldier who had defected to the North during the Korean War and had been one of a few Americans in the closed country.

The following year, a Japanese group that works on abduction cases said it had Chinese documents proving that a 23- or 24-year-old American man had been arrested in Yunnan. Then, it said, North Korean agents had taken him away.

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Later, the Abductees’ Family Union in South Korea said it had information from Pyongyang that Sneddon was there, married with two children — and had been teaching English to Kim Jong Un.

When Sneddon vanished in China, Kim was the 20-year-old heir apparent to the North Korean crown, studying at Kim Il Sung Military University in Pyongyang.

Soon after the South Korean reports emerged, the House passed a resolution calling on the State Department and the intelligence community to continue investigating what happened to Sneddon, including considering the possibility that North Korea abducted him.

The Senate passed an equivalent resolution, sponsored by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), in November.

State Department spokeswoman Katina Adams said the department had been in touch with officials from the South Korean and Japanese governments about these claims and the organizations making them, and had contacted North Korea.

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“While we did not receive an official response, the DPRK government publicly denied claims that Mr. Sneddon is living in Pyongyang,” she said.

“Thus far, we have not been able to verify any information suggesting that David Sneddon was abducted from China by North Korean officials or is alive in North Korea, but we will continue our efforts to search for any verifiable information,” she said.

Adams did not respond to questions about whether Trump had been briefed on the case.

But now, with the American president involved in an unprecedented outreach to North Korea, Sneddon’s relatives and friends had hoped that Trump would use the opportunity to at least raise the case.

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As the diplomatic efforts with North Korea gathered pace last year, Trump called for — and won — the release of three American citizens who had been detained in North Korea. But he has never mentioned Sneddon.

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“We understand that this might not be the top of the American priority. We recognize that the denuclearization negotiations are paramount,” Bailey said from his home in St. Louis, where he works in the financial industry.

“But if Trump is going to go and meet with Kim Jong Un, there is a real question as to whether he is going to bring this up. No one knows if Trump has even heard about this case. I’m not sure if people even care,” Bailey said before Trump’s summit with the North Korean leader in Hanoi this week, adding that he feels powerless.

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“Is anybody really trying to figure out what happened? Is Trump even going to ask?” he said.

Sneddon Reuel, while fully recognizing that none of the theories about her brother’s disappearance have been verified, also wondered whether the president would raise the issue.

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“I’m thinking it’s a fair question to pose,” she said ahead of the summit, noting that Jenkins, after he was released from North Korea, wrote that “anything is possible” in that country.