A 24-year-old Houston hiker was found dead in a Tennessee waterfall three days after he went missing, leaving his family grieving and still waiting on an official cause of death.
Sahil Jilani’s body was recovered Thursday in Abrams Falls inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park, three days after he was reported missing. His car turned up Wednesday at the Abrams Falls parking lot. Near the falls, searchers also found his cell phone, keys, and clothes.
The New York Post reported that Jilani had gone hours without checking in with his family, and that his location sharing stopped in an area without cellular service. The park is known for exactly that problem.
Officials have not released a cause of death. His family believes he drowned after getting caught in the powerful currents at the base of the falls.
Jilani was 24, from Houston, and had recently become an uncle. His sister, Asma Jilani Bustamente, a former entertainment journalist, spoke about the kind of man he was and what the loss has done to their household.
She told WVLT her brother was a “pure, kind, generous soul.”
"pure, kind, generous soul"
Bustamente said he wanted to help his mom retire and help his dad with dental procedures. She also said he “couldn’t wait to spoil” his niece “and teach her martial arts.”
A GoFundMe page described their mother’s “overwhelming feeling that something was terribly wrong” while he was missing. After his death, Bustamente said their mom was hospitalized “after losing her precious son.” The family said the death left an “irreplaceable void.”
Abrams Falls drops about 25 feet into a deep pool. Family descriptions put that pool at around 20 to 25 feet deep. Those are the conditions in which Jilani’s belongings were found nearby and his body was later recovered in the waterfall.
The National Park Service has long warned visitors about the same hazards that define this park. Cell phone service is “extremely limited.” Waterfalls can be “extremely slippery,” and explorers are told never to walk near the edge. Park material also flags “narrow mountain roads, blind curves, [and] steep drop-offs,” and urges hikers to research routes and carry a locator beacon when regular phones fail.
Those warnings exist for a reason. According to the National Park Service, ten people died in the Great Smoky Mountains last year.
Jilani’s case still has open questions. Absolute calendar dates were not detailed in the initial reporting. The official cause of death has not been revealed. It is also unclear from public accounts exactly who recovered the car, phone, keys, clothes, and body, or how wide the search ran.
What is clear is the sequence his family lived through: a young man stops checking in, his signal dies in a dead zone, his car sits at a waterfall trailhead, his gear turns up at the falls, and three days later he is gone.
National parks do not care about good intentions. When the trail ends at a slick ledge and a deep hydraulic, one wrong step can close a life, and leave a family holding an empty place no rescue can fill.
