About WSI
Board Members
Trey Werner
Trey Werner is the Founder/Executive Director of Wilderness Search Investigations (WSI), launched in 2021, which was created to help families find closure for missing outdoor enthusiasts after official searches are called off.
An industry vet, Trey has over 22 years of experience in search and rescue, first aid, and mountaineering and has served as a leader and in operations support for Snohomish County Search and Rescue in a variety of positions.
Trey has had many trainings and has certifications including, Search and Rescue Planning and Search Theory along with Search Management Systems, and he has had mountaineering first aid experience.
Besides running Wilderness Search Investigations, Trey is very active within his community and is a Ham radio operator for the Auxiliary Communications Service of Snohomish County and was a backcountry camp host for ten years with the US Forest Service.
Robin Parmelee
Robin Parmelee is the secretary for Wilderness Search Investigations. She brings a diverse career background covering real estate, legal research and intellectual property. She is currently a Sr. Intellectual Property Paralegal and was most recently employed at a large Seattle area oncology company with responsibilities for the intellectual property portfolio for the company.
Robin is an avid outdoors person and has spent a lot of time camping, fishing and hiking. She took an intense interest in hiking within the last few years. She is a supporter of Wilderness Search Investigations and is glad to contribute towards its mission.
Research
James Newlon
James (Jamie) Newlon is Wilderness Search Investigations research manager. While studying in college in his home state of Colorado in 2007, he had a personal family friend go missing, which was the beginning of his mission to locate missing persons with our organization. He has been studying missing persons cases on a personal level since 2013 with the idea that, small clues can lead to bringing someone’s loved one home.
James and other volunteers decided to help with a missing person case during the 2020 pandemic. James organized a massive search in Washington state to find a missing hiker from 2017. James asked Trey Werner, a certified search and rescue manager and search planner, to step in and assist with managing the search.
While researching missing persons cases for our organization it was discovered that databases from various federal and state organizations were poorly organized and not user friendly. Other databases included missing persons who were not missing in a wilderness type setting. Vowing to change the system, he has started a multi-year project to bring attention to missing people in the wilderness so that our database has all the details available, no matter how small to provide information to our team, other nonprofits, law enforcement, private investigators and other outdoor enthusiasts. This information is valuable for teams in the field to help identify probable areas to search and could provide addition clues to missing outdoor enthusiasts.