BOX ELDER COUNTY, Utah — It’s been officially one year since 19-year-old Dylan Rounds disappeared from Lucin, Utah. Since then, a man has been charged for his murder, but Rounds' body has yet to be found.
Rounds moved to Lucin last year to pursue his dream of being a farmer.
Tuesday marked one year when his mother, Candice Cooley, called law enforcement to report him missing.
“It was just that gut feeling that you knew,” she said.
The last time Rounds contacted his family was May 28, 2022.
Since then, Cooley has never given up the search for her son in the desolate lands of western Utah.
“You’ve got to have an answer. When you have an answer you can start to process. Until you have an answer you can’t process it,” said Cooley.
FOX 13 News was in Lucin with the family the first week of June, back when they first suspected foul play.
“We have just been making checkmarks. We take our radius and one step at a time we can take this off the board,” she said.
Rounds' case has baffled the nation. Many have pooled together resources and high tech to try and find him, including the Diesel Brothers back in October.
Small towns sold sunflower seeds in their country stores for Rounds' birthday. The flower is now a symbol of the missing young farmer.
“It’s been truly amazing for that amount of people to rally around a kid they just know through pictures,” said Cooley.
In March, a squatter who lived near Rounds' property was charged with aggravated murder and desecration of a body.
Investigators allegedly found Rounds' bloody boots on 59-year-old James Brenner’s property. They also found a timelapse video of Brenner, covered in blood, cleaning a gun at the time of the disappearance.
“If you’d have heard his voice in that first courtroom, a voice tells everything,” she said.
For Rounds' family, there’s no justice or peace of mind until Rounds is finally found.
“You don’t want to do a memorial, you don’t want to do anything until you have answers, so you just stay recluse and get through the weekend, and that’s what all of us did,” said Cooley. “It was easier to not deal with people.”
