Manitoba woman asks for help to find husband missing in Germany
Jeff Freiheit was last heard from in an Instagram post while hiking on Aug. 2
A Brandon woman is asking for help to find her husband who has gone missing while hiking in Germany.
Selena Freiheit last spoke with her husband Jeff over FaceTime on Aug. 1, when he was in Bad Tolz, Germany. The city was a stop during his trek on Der Traumpfad, a well-known European hike between Munich and Venice.
The following day he posted a video and image of himself on Instagram near the conclusion of that day's hike.
Since then, Selena Freiheit says, her husband hasn't checked in with family or arrived at any of the pre-booked overnight stops he had arranged ahead of time.
She says her husband is an experienced hiker who has trekked to Machu Picchu in Peru, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the base camp of Mount Everest over the past decade. He did months of research before embarking on this trip and Freiheit says it's out of character for him to break with his plan.
"Just based on travelling with my husband in the past, I know he's very structured and sticks to a plan, has a routine," she said.
"He'd already put in a deposit for some of these places he was planning to stay at, so it's not like him to want to lose money or to have chosen to go a different route and stay in different places."
Since then, she says, she's been in contact with the Austrian and German police, as well as the Canadian Embassy in Germany and other hikers in the area.
"We've accessed as many services as we can," she said. "And basically now it's just waiting for either the public to help or for the police to be able to do their work and hopefully get more information."
Freiheit has shared posts about her husband's disappearance in English and German across social media, and says the support she's had from people in Canada and Europe has been overwhelming.
She's asking Canadians who see the post to share it widely in the hopes that it will be seen in Europe.
"Just share it with whoever you can. He is a very social person, has the specific personality that I feel like he's a memorable person, that people would remember if they saw him," she said.
"And I just, I really want my husband to be home safe and to make sure that he's OK."