By Charlotte Smith

On April 1, 2006, around 2:00 a.m, Brian Shaffer was captured on security cameras entering the Ugly Tuna Saloona in Columbus, Ohio. He was never seen leaving and has been missing ever since. 

In 2020, there were 543,018 people reported missing in the United States alone. This was the lowest number of reported cases of missing people since 1990, which can partially be attributed to the global coronavirus pandemic, keeping people at home. 

But what exactly is a missing person? By definition, a missing person is someone who has disappeared completely and whose location and status, dead or alive, is unknown. 

The definition of a missing person is daunting, and the phrase, “dead or alive” is deceiving, especially considering that most missing person cases are resolved, and the person missing is more than likely to be found alive. In 2012, 99.7 percent of missing people cases were resolved in a year. Annually, there are around 4,400 unidentified bodies found that can then be traced back to missing people. In the U.S. today, there are currently 17,000 active missing person cases, including Brian’s, and around 13,000 unidentified body cases, commonly referred to as John or Jane Doe.

A promotional image for the HBO series Black and Missing. Image credit: HBO.

On the night of Friday, March 31, 2006, Brian Shaffer, a 27-year-old second-year medical student at Ohio State University, finished a steak dinner with his father, Randy Shaffer. It had been a stressful few days for Brian, and an even harder month, as he was in the midst of medical school exams and was still grieving the loss of his mother, and Randy’s wife, Renee Shaffer just a few weeks earlier. In Renee’s obituary, she was described as “a dedicated nurse who put her heart and soul into her profession.” Brian was extremely close with his mother, and Renee kept her family together. Her death on March 6, four weeks before that dinner, following a battle with rare blood cancer, left the Shaffer family in despair. Brian took the death especially hard but was seemingly handling the situation well. 

Brian Shaffer. Photo credit: Jenn Baxter.

After finishing dinner with Randy, Brian headed out with his roommate and friend, Clint Florence, to celebrate the beginning of spring break. The duo first went to the Ugly Tuna Saloona on Ohio State’s South Campus around 9:00 p.m. At 10:00 p.m, Brian stepped outside of the bar to call his girlfriend, Alexis Waggoner, who was also a second-year medical student at Ohio State. The two spoke, ended the call with “I love you,” and Brian headed back into the bar. Waggoner had no idea that this call would be the last time she ever spoke to Brian.

The Ugly Tuna Saloona. Photo credit: Chase-Anthony Ray.

After heading back into the Ugly Tuna, Brian and Florence decided to leave and go bar hopping in a different part of Columbus. After spending time at multiple bars, they found their friend Meredith Reed, who agreed to give them a ride back to the Ugly Tuna. From security cameras, Brian is seen re-entering the Ugly Tuna at approximately 1:15 a.m. 

When the bar closed at 2:00 a.m, Brian was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t outside, in the bathroom, or anywhere inside the bar. Florence and Reed searched for Brian and called him multiple times. Brian never answered. Florence and Reed assumed that Brian had gone back to his apartment without telling them. Brian was not in his apartment when they got home. 

Over the weekend, calls made to Brian from Waggoner, Randy, Florence, and Reed went unanswered. This was unusual and raised suspicions, but when Brian missed his Monday morning flight to Florida, a spring break trip with his girlfriend that was planned far in advance, friends and family felt that something was extremely wrong and called the Columbus Police Department. 

The first 48 hours of any investigation, especially a missing persons case, are the most crucial. After 48 hours pass, the chances of finding a missing person alive decreases significantly. 

When a person is reported missing, police will conduct an investigation and will try to locate the missing person. They will also determine if the person missing is considered to be endangered. Endangerment can be based on a medical issue, a recently known traumatic life event, or an instance of domestic or self-inflicted violence. Whether the missing person is deemed endangered or not, all people reported missing are entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. 

Sergeant John Hurst was the detective assigned to Brian’s case. Hurst, along with his colleagues, began their investigation at the Ugly Tuna. The Ugly Tuna is located close to an area of campus known for crime, meaning that there was an increased amount of security cameras around the bar.

In a missing person case, security camera footage is oftentimes crucial to an investigation, as it has exact times of when people were last seen, suspects can be caught on camera, and analyzing body language can be a helpful clue as well. But in Brian’s case, the security footage only left investigators more confused, as Brian was seen on an escalator entering the bar but was never seen leaving. 

Security footage of Brian with his friends entering the Ugly Tuna on the night of his disappearance. Photo credit: Morrigan, Morrigan’s Nook.

Before 2:00 a.m, footage shows Brian chatting with two females just outside of the bar. Once he re-entered the bar, he was never seen on film again. Detectives knew that Brian could not have left the way he came in, on the escalator, because one of the security cameras would have caught him leaving. The only other exit would have been behind the bar, an area that was under heavy construction and would have been especially hard to navigate in the dark and after a night of drinking. Another theory that detectives pondered was whether Brian had changed his outfit in the bar, or came up with a disguise, before leaving to go undetected by the security cameras.

Detectives also considered the idea that Brian was hurt inside of the bar. While this seemed like a weird possibility, if someone had hurt Brian inside of the bar, they would have had time to clean up what they had done before investigators were informed of Brian’s disappearance. If someone hurt Brian, they also would have been able to transfer him out of the bar through the back door, where construction was going on, undetected by cameras. 

Over the first few days of his disappearance, over 50 police officers and multiple K-9 units searched for Brian. They interviewed his family members, friends, roommates and searched the construction site behind the bar, trash cans on every street, hospitals, homeless shelters, local fields, and river banks. But Brian was nowhere to be found. He was gone. Even more confusing was the fact that his apartment was in seemingly perfect condition, with a made bed, a parked car, and neatly organized textbooks. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except for the fact that Brian was missing. 

Sergeant John Hurst of the Columbus, Ohio Police Dept., the lead investigator on Brian’s disappearance case. Photo credit: Alva Yaffe.

Investigators considered that maybe Brian was overwhelmed and needed to escape for a few days, and that surely he would be back. After all, if Brian wanted to disappear for a few days, he could, because Arizona State University Center For Problem-Oriented Policing states, “unlike juveniles, adults can legally go missing, and often they do so out of a wish to escape relationship difficulties, financial problems, depression, or just to disappear. When police locate these persons, they cannot divulge their location to those who reported them missing, just that they were located and do not wish to be contacted.”

But as Brian’s disappearance went from days to weeks to months, investigators felt confident that Brian did not just wander away, and that maybe some sort of foul play was involved. Detectives and family members were left with many questions and no answers, and nothing seemed to add up, especially considering that Brian missed his trip to Miami, where he had been planning on proposing to Waggoner.

While police had few leads, Randy never lost hope. He even had Brian’s favorite band, Pearl Jam, announce the case at one of their concerts. The reward for information on Brian was increased from $25,000 to $100,000. Brian’s brother, Derek Shaffer, even created a website to help raise awareness about Brian’s disappearance and hopefully receive some tips. Brian even made the FBI’s most-wanted list. After a year, Brian’s cellphone still went unanswered, and his bank account was untouched. No tips from anonymous callers ever turned into leads, and a desperate Randy even turned to psychics, where they suggested Brian’s body was trapped under rocks in a river. After searching the nearby rivers, Brian was still nowhere to be found. 

Randy was desperate for an answer about where his son was, what happened to him, and why. Unfortunately, Randy never got these answers, as he died in an accident when a tree branch fell on him in his backyard in September 2008. After Randy’s death, more false leads came through, including an anonymous message claiming to be Brian, and a body found with a slight resemblance to Brian. 

Brian’s case is still yet to be solved. Most people believe that Brian is dead and that his body is located somewhere in Columbus. Brian’s friends and family can’t imagine that he would purposefully wander off and leave his life and brother behind, especially following the death of both his mother and father.  

Brian’s missing poster. Photo credit: Find Brian Shaffer.

Until a case is solved, the person’s entry into the NCIC database remains active. Police continue to work on cases until they have exhausted all leads and then often turn to the public for tips and advice. Sometimes missing person cases can become cold because there is not enough information to find an answer. There are many websites, including the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS), which allow the public to view missing person cases to help give tips and possibly help solve cold cases, like Brian’s. 

People from around the world are intrigued by Brian’s disappearance. There are hundreds of YouTube videos, Reddit discussions, and various other platforms where people have posted conspiracies about Brian’s disappearance. Among the most popular theories is that a security camera glitched and Brian left the bar undetected and wandered off, where he could have been robbed, mugged, kidnapped, or randomly shot and killed, and then his body could have been transferred to another, undisclosed location. Brian could have also fallen into the construction area behind the bar. Construction workers might not have noticed his body and unknowingly poured concrete on top of him. Another common theory is that Brian could have easily passed out in a dumpster, died, then been taken to a landfill. Brian could have also committed suicide, or drowned in the local river. 

15 years later, Brian is still considered missing, and there are still few answers about what happened or where he is. One thing that hasn’t changed is people’s fascination with the case. It has been covered on many crime documentaries and podcasts, including Crime Junkie, and some people, like Lori Davis, a friend of the Shaffer family, have made it their mission to find answers to Brian’s disappearance. Davis’s fascination with the case is simply stated: “I couldn’t believe a 6-foot-2 man could just vanish.” 

Various photos of Brian, who is still considered to be missing. Photo credit: Orrin Grey.

While there are hundreds of theories about what happened to Brian, there are many people who are missing, just like Brian, whose cases don’t get nearly as much, if any, media attention. The media is often criticized for giving more attention to missing white, upper-class women and men as opposed to people in minority groups, non-white people, and people from lower socioeconomic classes. This criticism is commonly referred to as “Missing White Girl Syndrome.”

When someone who is a part of a high economic class goes missing, families of the missing have access to more resources to find their loved one, and these cases are oftentimes highly publicized by the media. With lots of news coverage and resources, these cases often have the best result in giving some sense of closure to families. But this feeling of closure is something that few minority families experience, despite spending countless amounts of money, time, and resources to search for their missing loved ones without much help from investigators or the added addition of the media. 

Duane Garvais-Lawrence raising awareness for missing Native Americans. Photo credit: Diannie Chavez.

In September, Duane Garvais-Lawrence biked and ran across the country from Washington State to the nation’s capital, Washington, DC, to raise awareness about missing and murdered indigenous people. Indigenous women are murdered at rates ten times higher than the national average. Garvais-Lawrence met with families of the missing and murdered along his cross-country journey. When he arrived in DC, he met with lawmakers about allocating more resources to finding missing Native American women. 

Unfortunately for Garvais-Lawrence and thousands of Native Americans, having a missing family member is far too common. Patricia Hibbeler, a member of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls committee (MMIW), said “there are probably few American Indians that haven’t been touched by MMIW. If it’s not somebody in our family, we know of someone, or a relative of someone, that sadly has been murdered or missing.” Native Americans are sometimes not prioritized by police officers, and oftentimes their cases are never fully investigated. It is also rare when the national media picks up a story on these women. 

Garvais-Lawrence finished his journey right as the search for Gabby Petito, a white woman who went missing in late August, was being conducted. After a media outcry on various news outlets and social media platforms, investigators pooled together hundreds of officers and resources to search for Petito and her missing fiance, Brian Laundrie. Petito’s body was later found in Wyoming, only strengthening the call for equal awareness for all missing people, not just white women. When asked about the Petito case, Garvais-Lawrence said he viewed it as a coincidence and stated, “there are 716 other cases in Wyoming that didn’t receive any attention at all. That is blood — blood on America’s conscience and society. It [has] got to end, and it will not end unless we have cooperation from our non-tribal brothers and sisters.”

Gabby Petito. Photo credit: Gabby Petito’s Instagram.

When Petito went missing, her story instantly became a sensation. The young influencer gained over one million Instagram followers and her hashtag (#gabbypetito) on TikTok has over 2.3 billion views. People were captivated by the images of a pretty, young, 22-year-old woman, who was documenting her journey out west with her fiance, Laundrie, online. As her story blew up on social media, everyone seemingly had an idea as to what happened to her. But while investigators worked and citizens across the world waited to hear updates, many people took this case and began to raise awareness about the issue of “Missing White-Girl Syndrome.” 

While media frenzy caused Petito to become a household name, some people of color felt that while Petito did deserve justice, they were hurt that missing people of color were being overlooked and never got the same attention and resources that Petito’s case did. Many also began asking the question of whether heavy media coverage helps or hurts an investigation. 

Sometimes media coverage can interfere with an investigation, but this was not the case for Petito. As her story and face became plastered on every news outlet, people from all over began turning in tips about encounters with Laundrie and where they had seen Petito’s white van. These tips, along with videos and photos that were turned in, ultimately allowed investigators to find Petito’s body. Without the extensive media coverage, people might not have come forward with seemingly small pieces of information that helped investigators solve the case. 

Brian Laundrie and Gabby Petito. Photo credit: Gabby Petito’s Instagram.

After Laundrie fled his home, his body was eventually found in a Florida park a month later. Laundrie was the prime suspect in the murder of Petito. Not only did her case raise awareness about domestic violence, but it also started the conversation about the different levels of media coverage and attention of law enforcement when people of color go missing.

The idea of vanishing without a trace is terrifying. And the thought that someone’s case would not get the same amount of attention because of racial differences or social class is also tragic. Missing person cases are hard enough on families, but when loved ones don’t receive a proper investigation, or are never found, like in the case of Brian Shaffer, hope to find the missing dwindles.