MEDICINE HAT, AB — Hours slowly turned into days.
Friends of Rylan Vaile hadn’t heard from him since Friday night and were beginning to worry, knowing the 23-year-old wasn’t familiar with the city.
Vaile and his friends were in town from Lethbridge.
Police say after an altercation at a hotel, Vaile left, hoping to hitchhike home.
He didn’t have any cash or a phone and he wasn’t dressed in much more than a windbreaker.
“I went the Co-op on 13th Avenue [on Saturday], I had to pick up a few things, nothing much, and I saw, between the two doors, there’s a little bench and I saw a young man there,” said Mark Miller.
Miller stopped when the man asked if he could catch a ride out to Highway 3.
Knowing there must be more to the story, Miller took the seat beside him.
“I said, ‘so what’s your story?’ And he said ‘well, I was abandoned here and I’m trying to get home. I got no money, no cell phone, and I want to get back home.’”
In the meantime, officers were hearing from friends that a 23-year-old man from Lethbridge had gone missing.
“His friends became very concerned for him,” said Inspector Joe West. “This person didn’t have a cell phone or any means of communication, was unfamiliar with the city of Medicine Hat.”
Vaile was asking anyone he came across for help.
“When I finally sat down, he said ‘thank you’,” Miller said. “He said ‘you’re the first person to stop and actually talk to me’.”
Miller didn’t want to drop him off on the side of the road, so after a quick stop to grab lunch, he brought Vaile downtown to the bus depot.
“I said, ‘this man has got to get to Lethbridge today’,” he remembers saying.
“I paid for the ticket, gave him $20 ‘cause he didn’t have any food or money and I said here, get yourself something, get yourself sorted,” Miller added.
Miller said he felt blessed to have helped the man.
He told a few friends at church the following day what he’d done to help this man.
Later that evening, he got a message.
“I got a text from my friend, going ‘was this the person that you helped?’ And I opened it up and it said Medicine Hat Police Report and I’m thinking oh, no, what’s going on now?”
Police had released details about Vaile Sunday morning.
Later that afternoon, Southeast Alberta Search and Rescue was called in, along with the Halo Air Ambulance to search for any clues as to where Vaile may have been.
“When a person has a cell phone, we at least have a means of communicating or trying to ping the cell phone and so forth,” West said. “We didn’t have that option, so it really became a matter of ground search given the weather.”
Miller reached out to police after seeing the release, and the man’s family on Facebook.
On Monday, he heard back, that Vaile had made it home and was safe and sound.
“If we can help people get to where they’re going, you don’t give them a hand out, you give them a hand up,” Miller said. “You always want to help them up.”
It’s a message he hopes more Hatters take to heart.
“If you see someone in need, just stop and help them,” he said. “I mean, you might not be able to go the extra mile but to stop and talk to them, [for them] to know somebody cares. I think that was the biggest thing that touched my heart is, ‘you’re the first person to stop’.”
