Maria Andrews and David Hargreaves both worried about the weather during their drive down from Waynesburg, Pa., to Morgantown on the afternoon of Feb. 3, 2022.
Purple clouds layered low in the sky as the rain pounded the windshield.
It was probably sleet, from the sound of it – and that would probably be snow by sunset.
And Bryn was still out there.
He was somewhere, anyway.
Somewhere, and likely as alone as a guy could be, they feared.
That’s why Maria, his mother, and David, his brother, got in that plane and flew across the Atlantic from their native England to get here.
An ocean wasn’t anything compared to the chasm of dread feelings they were traversing that day.
Driving in the other lane on I-79 wasn’t either.
Bryn Hargreaves had been in better emotional straits, his mother and sibling said.
It had been one month to the day since he had last spoken to family back home in Wigan, a working-class city and rugby hotbed in northern England, between Manchester and Liverpool.
The subject of the search earlier had notable success in the sport that inspired American football.
He turned professional, enjoying the fame and money that went with it.
Like a lot of athletes, however, he didn’t have a long go.
At 26, he walked away from the sport his grandfather had also played professionally.
He married a woman he met on holiday in Mexico, an American from Pittsburgh, which led to a new beginning across the pond.
Ten years later, Maria and David buckled themselves into that airplane seat, and then into that rental car … because when Monongalia County sheriff’s deputies tried the door to Bryn’s Whisper Creek apartment, and the easy give surprised them because it wasn’t locked … and his wallet, keys and cell phone were still there and the shower was running without him in it … well, then, everyone suddenly knew they were in the midst of a mystery.
Later that afternoon, in the newsroom of The Dominion Post during an exclusive interview, Maria furrowed her brow at the all of it.
“It was like he was abducted, or did a walk-around.”
Two weeks ago, hunters discovered human remains in a wooded expanse along South Pierpont Road, in an area close to Whisper Creek Apartments.
Monday, Monongalia County Sheriff Perry Palmer announced a positive identification: Bryn Hargreaves.
American dreams (and isolation)
Ten years ago, his mother said, Bryn had a new bride and was brimming with new hope.
“At 26, he still had quite a few years left in him, so he was off to America with the start of a new life.”
He had an interesting and even exotic backstory to Pittsburgh ears – a celebrity rugby athlete back home now walking among them in his new home – but the only job he could find was as a laborer at an engineering firm in the Steel City that did exploration work in the Marcellus shale.
It wasn’t the job he wanted, his mom said, but it was the job he made do – deploying an easy, American-styled grin, and the stiff upper lip of a Brit, at the same time.
He quickly made project manager. At 6-foot-2 and a muscled 220 pounds, no one was going to outwork him on the job site.
The only thing that wasn’t working was his marriage, which ended in divorce.
In the meantime, Hargreaves was sent to help direct drilling sites in locales from Waynesburg in Pennsylvania to Vienna, Wood County, in the Mountain State.
Such a transfer landed him in Morgantown, right before the pandemic in 2020.
On Dec. 8, 2021, he had a car crash, disabling his Jeep and leaving him with nagging back and neck injuries.
He had taken to walking or relying on Uber drivers, David said.
On top of COVID quarantines, being divorced – while also being an ocean away from his close family during Christmas – didn’t help, his brother told The Dominion Post.
“He hasn’t been in a good place,” David Hargreaves said then.
“We just want him back home,” Maria seconded that afternoon, as she brushed at tears.
A consideration of everything
In the meantime, life has gone on for the Hargreaves family of Wigan, even under the shadow of a son and brother gone missing in another country.
David, who had proposed marriage to his then-girlfriend from atop the Mount Washington overlook in Pittsburgh, walked down the aisle with her in England, a couple of months after his search in West Virginia.
A third Hargreaves brother, Gareth, and his wife, welcomed their second child around that same time.
He didn’t make the journey to America that February because he needed to stay close to his wife and the hospital.
Over the past several months, Gareth had emerged as the de facto spokesman for the family in the British press, pleading with authorities here to do, well, everything.
Gareth didn’t want anything ruled out in the case of his big brother, who was the best man at his wedding.
“If he’s had a rubbish time and had enough so he’s taken himself away, that’s fair enough,” he told reporters last summer.
“But if something has happened and we didn’t try to help or find him I could never forgive myself. It’s one of the reasons I can leave this.”
Palmer is now awaiting the autopsy report from the state’s Chief Medical Examiner’s Office.
Celebrating Bryn
Maria Andrews and David Hargreaves also celebrated the life-force that was Bryn that day in The Dominion Post, as they talked about their hope for a positive outcome.
Despite starring in a sport where the scrums can draw blood, he was hardly a thuggish sort, they said.
Bryn was well-read and soft-spoken, he said, a guy who played guitar and sketched the English countryside.
They poked gentle fun at the distinct mash-up of his accent, which, after a decade in the States, wasn’t quite as Angelo as it used to be.
“He now says ‘aluminum,’ whereas we still say, ‘awl-you-min-EEH-um,’” David remembered.
Both had to smile at his trademark British drollery, that didn’t go away.
Whenever asked, in American fashion, how he was doing, “Absolutely average,” was the response, David said.
“Everybody loves him. I’d call him an English gentleman.”
TWEET@DominionPostWV
