Auburn Student Weston Higginbotham Found Dead in Japanese Mountains After Weeklong Search

James "Weston" Higginbotham, a 20-year-old Auburn University junior from Alabama who disappeared during a family vacation in Japan, was found dead Saturday in a mountainous area outside Kyoto, ending a frantic search that had stretched more than a week and drawn in scores of police and volunteers.

His body was discovered by a volunteer search-and-rescue group in rugged terrain that an earlier police operation, involving more than 100 officers, had been unable to cover successfully. His mother, Nancy Higginbotham, confirmed his death in a post on Saturday, June 6. The family did not specify how he died, and the cause remained under investigation by Japanese authorities.

Higginbotham was reported missing on May 29 while traveling with his family. According to relatives, he stopped responding to his family's messages and turned off the location sharing on his phone, cutting off the most direct way to track his movements. The disappearance set off an agonizing, days-long effort that played out across the steep, densely forested mountains ringing one of Japan's most visited regions.

In an account that has resonated widely, the family said Weston walked away from his parents while his mother was using the artificial-intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to help find restaurants and sights in the area — an ordinary moment on a family trip that gave way to a parent's worst nightmare. What began as a brief separation in unfamiliar surroundings hardened, hour by hour, into a full-scale missing-person case.

As the days passed without a trace, the search grew into a sprawling operation that combined Japanese police, local authorities and civilian volunteers who know the terrain. Officers fanned out across trails and ravines while the family pleaded publicly for help and information, an appeal that drew attention on both sides of the Pacific. In the end, it was a volunteer group — not the large police contingent — that located him in an area the official search had struggled to reach.

"Our family is heartbroken," Nancy Higginbotham wrote. "The grief we feel is impossible to put into words." The discovery brought a devastating end to a vigil that had been followed closely in Japan and back home in Alabama, where Auburn's tight-knit campus community had rallied around the family, sharing flyers and messages of support throughout the uncertainty.

The case has underscored the perils that can befall travelers in unfamiliar and remote terrain, even in a country with a reputation for safety, and the limits of technology when a phone goes dark. Authorities in Japan said the investigation into the circumstances of Higginbotham's death was continuing, and the family asked for privacy as they began to grapple with their loss and the long process of bringing him home.