A 38-year-old man visiting Washington from Oklahoma has been missing for nearly three weeks after walking away on foot from the Muckleshoot Community Center in Auburn, and a statewide alert for him only went out this week. Geno Hoff was last seen on July 26 leaving the community center in an unknown direction of travel, according to the Missing Indigenous Person Alert issued under case number C26020958.
The Washington State Patrol activated the alert Friday on behalf of the King County Sheriff’s Office, according to a Washington State Patrol post on Facebook, which noted the agency received the alert request that same day. Hoff is described as 5 feet 7 inches tall and about 225 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. He was last seen wearing a gray sweatshirt reading “Kuwey Tribe” on the front, a gray beanie, and pants of an unknown color, and he was carrying a black purse.
The nearly three-week gap between Hoff’s disappearance and the alert’s activation traces back to procedural steps built into the state’s alert system. State guidelines require local law enforcement to first take an official missing persons report and enter the case into the National Crime Information Center database, a process that must happen before the Washington State Patrol can activate a statewide Missing Indigenous Person Alert, according to the Washington State Legislature. It remains unclear from available information what specifically caused the delay in Hoff’s case, or whether investigators are focused on the local area or on transit routes back to Oklahoma.
Where Hoff Was Last Seen
The Muckleshoot Community Center, located at 17432 SE 392nd Street in Auburn, serves as a major hub for cultural, recreational, and social gatherings on Muckleshoot tribal lands. The center regularly hosts large tribal and community events, and it has also served as a venue for statewide and national policy gatherings on the missing Indigenous persons crisis, including sessions of the Washington State MMIWP Task Force, according to FOX 13 Seattle.
A System Built After Years of Advocacy
Washington became the first state in the nation to establish a dedicated Missing Indigenous Person Alert system when Governor Jay Inslee signed House Bill 1725 into law in March 2022, with the network officially launching that July, as reported by KIRO 7 News. Between the program’s launch and August 2024, the Washington State Patrol issued 114 alerts, successfully locating missing individuals in all but 13 cases, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting…