[narrator] Sydney West disappeared
on September 30th, 2020.
She was a young girl,
last seen on the Golden Gate Bridge.
[man] Nobody saw anything.
It was just a very eerie thing.
She just kinda disappears in the fog,
never to be seen again.
It was clear to me that those alarm bells
are that she's not safe have gone off in my head.
[narrator] Her family is desperate for answers.
Two guys in a city of five million
walking around trying to find my daughter.
We absolutely believe that somebody must know something.
It's still just unbelievable to me.
Where is she?
[narrator] This episode of Disappeared
retraces Sydney's last known steps.
[man] Did in fact she have some kinda seizure
or some kinda incident on the bridge,
that may have triggered her to get amnesia and disappear?
[man] How could any parent stop looking?
It's impossible.
Because I'm her father,
I'm gonna spend the rest of my life looking for her,
if that's what I have to do.
[narrator] The more people who know Sydney's story,
the greater the chance of bringing her home.
Share on social media,
get the word out, help find her.
Have you seen Sydney West?
[suspenseful music playing]
[dramatic music playing]
My name is Jay, and I'm Sydney West's father.
On September 30th, 2020,
my daughter Sydney West disappeared
out in San Francisco.
She was 19 years old.
She grew up just 35, 40 miles from San Francisco,
but we had moved halfway through Sydney's high school
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
My name is Kimberly West.
I'm Sydney West's mother.
Sydney is a very intelligent person.
As a child, she just had her hands
in so many different things.
She was a kid that would sit for hours
and just draw or construct and just create.
And, you know, that was one of the things
that I cherished about her.
[Kimberly] She would love spending time with her sister, Faith,
and the dogs.
Sports have always been a very big part of her life
from when she was young playing softball
to when she started playing volleyball in middle school,
and then played throughout high school,
and then also played club volleyball.
She also is passionate about the arts,
so that would be her piano playing,
songwriting, singing, putting that together.
[Jay] She eventually began to write
and perform music here locally.
♪ I'll never love again ♪
♪ Ahh ♪
And it was incredibly well received.
[audience cheering]
She applied to lots of schools
and she actually got in to a lot of schools,
one of those was UC Berkeley.
And we were so excited for her and so happy for her.
But this was 2020
and because of COVID, things were rapidly changing.
Sydney's dream was to go to Cal
and have the college experience
that she dreamed of.
And when she got there,
it was completely the opposite of that.
[Jay] The COVID thing was awful.
We showed up in Berkeley, you know, adorning masks
and, you know, moving her in was,
you had to take turns moving in
because you weren't allowed to meet people
in the hallway, and that was a challenge.
In all honesty,
I was incredibly worried about her.
[Kimberly] Once Sydney was in the dorms
and classes were starting,
none of her classes were gonna be in person.
They were 100% gonna be remote, on the computer.
That was an enormous challenge to her.
And, you know, socially, the isolation,
she was really suffering.
Ultimately, the decision amongst us all
was that she would defer
and leave UC Berkeley,
with the hopes that by the following year,
things would be, you know, back to normal.
So once Sydney left the dorms,
she took advantage of the fact
that we had lived in California for a long time
and knew many people.
So she reached out to some of her friends
and visited different friends
and stayed with different friends
who were in the Bay Area.
And then, ultimately,
she stayed with some close family friends
in Livermore for a few weeks.
And she was trying to figure out what she was gonna do.
This was not a part of the plan
and this is a kid who likes to plan.
So whether she was gonna stay there,
she was gonna come here, she was gonna get a job,
you know, I think she was trying to figure that out.
But she liked to go into the city,
into San Francisco.
And so on September 29th, 2020,
she decided to spend the night in the city,
so she got a hotel room for that night.
[Jay] I knew she was struggling then as well,
and so she went to a hotel to, I guess, decompress.
At that time, I was out in California,
in San Diego for work
and that day was the last time I spoke to Sydney.
I remember having that phone call.
We'd been on the phone for well over an hour
and, you know, we talked about where she was
and what she was doing.
And I wanted her to come home,
but she felt like she had let herself down,
that she had let her family down.
And much of my conversation
was tell me what I can do right now to help you
because I love you,
and just reminding her that she's got a whole army
of people around her that loved her,
and that she was not alone.
And she knew that.
And I believe we wrapped up our phone call
around 4:30.
I mean, I think that everything
was somewhat uncertain.
I didn't really know what her plans were.
Of course, I expected to speak with her in the next day.
[Kimberly] On September 30th, 2020,
it was a pretty regular day.
I took our daughter Faith to school,
and then I was home.
Sydney knew... I mean, we're very open
about the fact that we all shared location.
That was not abnormal,
especially given that she was
on the other side of the country.
We weren't trying to harass her or be a pain,
but, you know, she's a beautiful young woman
and we just wanted to make sure that,
you know, that we had some eyeballs on her
in a way that we could.
[Jay] That morning, I woke up pretty early.
It was probably about 7:00.
I mean, maybe I'm a stalker dad,
but I checked the locations
and, uh, and Sydney's, I couldn't find.
I tried calling, but I couldn't reach her by phone.
She would typically respond to a text,
but the texts were going unread.
I couldn't find her, and I couldn't call her
and we didn't know where she was.
Jay called me, and we had a phone conversation
about, like, what do you know?
What do I know? What can we find out?
We knew where she had stayed at in terms of the hotel,
so we had reached out to make sure she had checked out,
to find out what was going on there.
I do remember grabbing my iPad
that had access to Sydney's email
and stuff like that to see
if there was something going on.
Our bank accounts are linked, so I remember going in there
and seeing if there was anything.
I knew
that she had taken a Rideshare,
so I found that receipt
and Sydney left the hotel
the morning of September 30th.
It was early, it was a little...
A little after 6:00 a.m.
And that she arrived
to the Crissy Field Golden Gate Bridge area
around 6:30 a.m.,
and that wasn't that unusual.
She could have been going there to exercise.
She loved the Golden Gate Bridge.
She liked to spend time there.
[Jay] My brother Rob lives just south of San Francisco,
so I called Rob, and I told him I was coming.
I was at work and he basically called me
to tell me that, you know, all of her communications,
the phone was off and we could not locate her.
And he was coming up to San Francisco
that day, that afternoon.
It was stressful
and very scary not knowing where she was.
And so I met him in San Francisco.
[Jay] My brother and I went pretty much
straight away to Crissy Field,
which is near the Golden Gate Bridge,
and started looking for her.
I know it's kind of crazy, but we had to look,
you just had to do whatever you could do in that moment.
[Jay] And, you know, we're literally two guys
in a city of 5 million,
walking around trying to find,
you know, this young girl, young woman.
We were going to people into saying,
"Have you seen this girl," showing them pictures.
And they're like, "Do you have a flyer?"
And we're like, "No." I mean,
you know, we felt entirely inadequate
to be honest.
We were thinking, where the hell could she be?
Her bank account didn't have a ton of money in it
and she hadn't shown up back in Livermore,
and so we're freaking dead worried.
It was at this point that we called the SFPD.
We met the police somewhere
in San Francisco down... Somewhere downtown,
and we were giving a report to them
and filing a missing person's report.
[Jay] I was feeling terror,
and it was clear to me that those alarm bells
are that she's not safe, had gone off in my head.
At that moment, I just felt
kind of like helpless and out of sort,
and then I just remember,
like, my stomach just kind of sinking
and just feeling like that throughout the day.
And it felt very, very surreal.
I was there in San Francisco for at least a day,
and then I flew home to Chapel Hill.
My wife was crushed
and I... And her little sister
didn't really understand what's going on.
My responsibility as a husband and father
was to be there for my family.
And it was a very difficult decision to come home
because I felt like I was leaving Sydney out there.
But we felt like it was better to take a step back
and define a strategy of how we're gonna find her,
because four legs in San Francisco aren't gonna do it.
That was clear.
I am Roxy Garrity.
I've been covering the Sydney West case.
So Sydney's case is unique.
Sydney was last seen in Crissy Field.
This area actually has its own police force,
the Golden Gate Bridge Patrol.
So authorities had to communicate with each other.
Crissy Field is a federal land.
The San Francisco police had to work
with those federal agents.
[Jay] At that point, we were in Chapel Hill,
but we're assigned a detective
that began to investigate the case
in San Francisco.
It wasn't long after that
that that detective contacted me.
I'll never forget where I was...
When that happened.
I was about halfway down Route 86 in Hillsborough
and I damn near crashed the truck into the woods.
Sydney's backpack was found near the bridge.
I have still not been able to look in that backpack.
[suspenseful music playing]
[Jay] At this point, Sydney had been missing for about a week
and then the police department in San Francisco,
the SFPD, had gone to the bridge
and seen video of Sydney on the bridge.
They told us that they had found video
on the Golden Gate Bridge
of someone who looked like Sydney.
And they were basically telling us,
sorry, she was last seen on the bridge,
so that's probably not good news.
[Jay] They believed
that she had committed suicide.
I was shattered,
shattered.
So I started asking a lot of questions.
How do you know this?
What evidence do you have?
They just left me with like a million questions
about what they saw.
It is difficult for me
to conceive of her doing that
because of her personality.
She's not the kind of kid who...
just throws her relationships away.
She never has been.
But Sydney struggled with anxiety and depression,
and she had been struggling with it for a couple of years.
In July 2020,
we were at a family vacation up on the lake
near Asheville, North Carolina.
And we had our boat up there
and our boat was under a dock that had a roof
and you could jump off the roof and into the water.
And it was a pretty good drop.
It was probably 15,
16 feet to the water.
And so she asked me, "Hey, Dad,
what do you think about me jumping off with a floaty?"
I said, "Don't do it
because you're gonna hit the water
and you're gonna stop,
and it's gonna be like hitting the concrete."
And I think she thought I was kidding
and she jumped off.
I remember when she came up from the water,
her lip was bleeding
as if she had taken a blow to the head,
which she did.
So she felt nauseous, she was not feeling well.
[Jay] She was severely concussed.
You know, part of this I feel responsible for,
because she always wanted to...
kind of impress me
or be like me.
I don't even think my wife knows that.
I feel bad about that.
After that trip, when we got home,
it was quite evident that she was not feeling well
and she was diagnosed with a concussion.
It seemed like things kept happening,
the concussion,
not feeling well,
not being able to really be with friends.
It just kind of seemed like the punches kept coming,
so I felt sad for her
and felt bad,
and I also knew that this wasn't a great thing
for anybody's mental health.
It's gonna just make her feel further depressed and sad.
[Jay] Her mood swings,
everything changed when that occurred.
Her personality was different after that.
Typically people that are concussed
that have any kind of history
of anxiety and depression,
it's a massive trigger
to bring those symptoms back on,
and I think that we saw that.
We hadn't seen the video at that point,
we just had talked to a detective
who made an immediate conclusion,
she had jumped off the bridge.
I remember asking if we could see the bridge footage
and we were definitely told, no,
that that was not possible, that they don't share that.
[Jay] This wasn't a smooth process
where there was engagement and cooperativity.
We literally had to scream bloody murder
at the police commissioner through a very senior level
attorney general to get them to move.
And we're blessed with people that we know
that can move the needle,
and we were granted access,
my brother and I, to watch the video on the bridge.
And so, I flew back to California for that
and to collect Sydney's belongings
from the police department.
Hands down, that was the worst day of my life.
Hands down, the worst day of my life.
[Roxy] It's understandable why the San Francisco Police
may think that Sydney West committed suicide.
She was a young girl struggling,
last seen on the Golden Gate Bridge,
and since it was built in 1937,
it's been a magnet for suicides
and thousands of people have jumped off that bridge.
[Jay] My brother and I were with the bridge police
for about two hours, maybe more.
To be honest, I was thinking that I was gonna watch
my daughter plunge to her death,
and, um, what we saw in the video
was Sydney, it was her.
She ran up on the south span of the bridge
closest to the city.
She was initially walking
and she had her phone in her hand
because you could see that it was lit.
And then, she turned around and she went back down,
and then reemerged without her backpack,
and began running up the bridge.
It was about 6:36 a.m.
I could even see her idiosyncratic
kind of behavior,
her dad-pleasing behavior as she was running
because one of the things I used to teach her
was, you know, to run in a certain way
so she didn't damage her knees,
and she was running like that.
And then, there's another bridge cam
that's further up the bridge that we saw Sydney again
run past that camera,
and I think it's very important to understand
that those cameras are not there to image people,
they're there for essentially the security of the bridge.
And so it was dark, it was quite foggy
at the time that she was there,
and there was essentially three visuals of her.
She walked up, walked back,
dumped the bag, went for a run,
and what we looked for most
was her exiting the bridge.
Could we see a figure like her exiting the bridge
on the other side, and we could not.
There were so many people on the bridge that morning,
it was shocking, actually surprising how many people.
There was a lot of people coming and going,
people on bikes, people running.
[Jay] The detective, her reasoning
for thinking that it was suicide
was that Sydney had left her backpack in the park.
And that she hasn't exited the bridge, that's it.
The bridge police had made an immediate conclusion
and did not seem to be any inclination
to ask any more questions past that.
But there's no possible way in my mind
that there's any way she could've gotten over that rail
without somebody seeing something.
I watched the video, it was busy,
and they would see somebody climbing over the rail.
My brother and I left to go downtown San Francisco,
to go to the police department,
to pick up Sydney's backpack.
[Rob] I actually took her backpack
because he couldn't touch it.
There wasn't anything to help with that.
She had a bunch of art work,
drawings, and things like that,
a couple items of clothing I think,
that was about it.
[Kimberly] Mainly it was overnight clothes,
probably because she had decided
to spend the night in the city,
and got a hotel room for that night,
but also, there were some notebooks
and some colored pencils,
nothing of true significance
in terms of giving us more information
that she had jumped.
I just found my brain wanting
so much more information
than what I could get from them,
and it was just super frustrating.
[Jay] The San Francisco Police Department,
they believed that she had committed suicide.
So effectively what they're saying
is the case is open
but we're not gonna investigate any further.
There is not a shred of evidence
that she went over the rail of that bridge.
[Rob] We were on our own.
It was clear at that point
that it was our responsibility,
that the law enforcement was...
Had moved on.
And, I mean, I was literally calling morgues
for a long time,
like, on a daily basis...
looking for my niece.
It was hard to do that.
And I was looking literally just going out on a kayak
and looking for her,
just to, you know, look and try to find some proof.
[Jay] We don't have any remains, nothing.
And so, you know, we just can't...
We can't end there.
It was very apparent that we needed to do
anything we could to find Sydney.
We were researching
what organizations are out there that can help us,
what avenues we should use
to put information out,
and we put together a flyer,
we talked to two different private investigators,
and ultimately hired ours, Scott Dudek.
My name is Scott Dudek.
I'm a private investigator
in the San Francisco Bay area.
I was contacted by the West family
approximately two weeks after Sydney disappeared,
and they reached out to me to see if I could assist them
in finding their missing daughter.
I have approximately 32 years of experience
in law enforcement.
One of my specialties as a private investigator
is in fact trying to locate people
that have disappeared.
I think, originally the San Francisco Police
took on the missing person case
but then I think what ended up happening
is A, they're a very busy department,
B, I think they started to think
something may have happened to Syd
by Syd's choice,
and I think once they made up that decision,
they never really looked any further.
One of the first steps I take in an investigation like this
is try to get into their background.
Sydney's father let me know
that the last time he spoke to her
was on September 29th,
and that was via phone.
She arrived at the hotel in San Francisco
in the afternoon.
She checked out on September 30th
and ordered an Uber around 6:25 a.m.
When the Uber picked her up,
the Uber driver took her to Crissy Field
in San Francisco,
and the video showed
Syd walking on the Golden Gate Bridge.
I'm not sure if she was planning
on going to that area
but I did learn it's something
that she enjoyed doing.
It was very foggy that day,
extremely foggy that day.
It was kind of a... Just a very eerie thing,
she just kinda disappears in the fog,
never to be seen again.
As a private investigator,
one of the first things I wanna do
is I wanna feel comfortable
ruling out certain things,
and one of the biggest things
that I wanted to rule out
was that she committed suicide.
So I decided to talk to her doorman
at the hotel she stayed with that night.
He said she called an Uber
but we had a nice conversation
while she was waiting for the Uber,
and that he helped her get into the car.
I said, "Well, why would you remember her?"
And he went back to say,
"She was very pretty,
tall, blonde, had a great personality,
and was comfortable talking to people."
He was extremely helpful for me,
to set the what was in her mind
just prior to her being dropped off.
So if you use all those things as an indicator,
again, there's nothing to indicate
that she was planning on doing something out of the norm.
Approximately, at 6:25
is when records indicate
she actually got into the rideshare
and the rideshare took her over
to Crissy Field and dropped her off there.
[Roxy] This is a popular drop-off spot
if you wanna walk the Golden Gate Bridge.
It's right at the base of the bridge.
I did in fact contact the San Francisco Police
to see if I could get
that rideshare driver's name and phone number
so I could directly interview him.
They did not provide that information to me,
however, they did tell me
that they interviewed him at length
and he actually was upset
to learn that Sydney was missing.
He didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.
She wasn't in the back of his rideshare crying
or anything like that.
It was just a normal ride for him at 6:30
in the morning over to Crissy Field.
[Roxy] The rideshare driver cooperated fully.
With the San Francisco Police, it has been cleared.
[Scott] I did also learn that her backpack had been found
in bushes in Crissy Field.
I also was told
that her phone was missing out of the backpack,
which led me to believe
if she was planning on something,
that she wouldn't have taken her phone.
She hid her backpack.
She didn't wanna carry it around with her.
When I contacted the United States Coast Guard,
they never received any reports
that somebody may have seen something floating
in the waterway that was unusual,
they never received any calls from boaters
in regards to anything suspicious.
[Roxy] When a jump from the Gold Gate Bridge is witnessed,
a patrol officer drops a flare into the water.
The coast guard is usually able to get there
within four to five minutes.
They take that body to Fort Baker,
and the Marin County coroner
is able to do an autopsy and identify the body,
and usually notify the family.
But unfortunately, if a jump is not witnessed,
there's no way to track that body.
[Scott] With the Coast Guard because they're experts
as far as the currents and stuff like that goes,
specifically in that area,
one of the questions I ask was,
if someone jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge,
is it a high probability the body would be found
or what type of probability?
And they told me that there was a higher probability
that the body would show up
or initially in the very beginning it would show up,
and obviously that has not occurred yet.
There's two specific railings
that people would have to actually crawl up on, okay?
And put their feet over to attempt to jump off of there.
I'm not saying it's an impossible task
but at that hour,
somebody would've seen her
doing those movements,
you've got cars
because it's bumper to bumper traffic,
you've got bikes, you've got walkers,
you've got tourists,
and nobody saw
this person whatsoever?
It just doesn't make sense.
I will always go back to if there's no body and proof,
that we have to continue to believe
that she's out there.
There's no proof that Sydney ended her life.
Without definitive proof,
how could any parent stop looking?
It's impossible.
I do not think Sydney jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.
One of the questions that's asked me over and over
is do I still think Sydney's alive?
And I think Sydney, 100% is still alive.
[Roxy] Based off what I've read about this case
and who I've talked to, as a journalist,
you can't rule out anything
just because there is not enough evidence.
So there is no evidence of her jumping.
Did she run away?
[Jay] Sydney is highly intelligent.
If she did not wanna be found, she would know how to do that.
She is a highly intelligent and independent young woman.
Even though Sydney had left Cal
and was not living the life that she had envisioned
for herself at that moment in time,
she wouldn't just disappear,
she wouldn't just run away,
she wouldn't just go off and not talk to us,
or not talk to somebody else close to us,
one of her friends,
one of our other family members out there.
It was very abnormal
to just suddenly have no contact whatsoever.
[Roxy] There's been no activity on her bank account
and she didn't really any take
of her belongings with her if she did run away,
so that theory is probably less
but you also can't rule it out.
[Scott] Sydney's movements were consistent
up until the point where she left the hotel.
And then, after that, it was just so uncharacteristic
for her not to contact her family,
not to text her sister, her younger sister.
That was something she did all the time, too.
Her and her younger sister were very close.
One of the things that I just can't let go of
is the fact that the Bay area's
just a huge hub for human trafficking.
So the totality of the whole situation made me believe
that this, in fact, was probably foul play.
[narrator] Sydney West was last seen
September 30th, 2020.
If you have any information,
please contact Scott Dudek
at 925-705-8328.
[Scott] During the investigation,
the first comment people make
is how beautiful Sydney is.
She's just a very beautiful young girl.
And just based on her looks,
her mannerisms, her personality,
if she in fact chit-chatted with somebody on the bridge
that could've lured her
into a vehicle at some point,
or maybe she hit it off with somebody
or something like that,
and one of my biggest theories or fears
is that that's maybe what had occurred to her,
is somebody kidnapped her,
recruited her, took her out of the area.
I've contacted probably an excess of a hundred people
over the course of the investigation in that area.
Right down to some of the girls,
the street walkers and stuff,
to see if in fact they knew of a pimp
that would do something like this,
take somebody just randomly,
and they took the flyers
so they could ask around for me
and they kept in contact.
The cooperation has just been tremendous
because it's really hard to break in to that world.
The girls are helpful to a certain extent,
but they have to also worry about themselves.
[Kimberly] A lot of people asked about,
like, what about sex trafficking?
That's huge in San Francisco, unfortunately.
And so one of the avenues
we checked early on
when we were linking up with various organizations
was with an organization
that deals with sex trafficking,
and they reviewed all the information
and said you know, "We don't really see
any indication that this would be that situation."
Another factor I also learned about Sydney
is she did suffer a pretty severe concussion.
Did in fact she have some kind of seizure
or some kind of incident on the bridge
that may have triggered her to get amnesia
or--or something along that line.
[Jay] Could Sydney have had a break in her memory?
Yes.
To me, it's as plausible as the alternative.
Sydney showed symptoms of post-concussion syndrome,
which can lead to headaches,
dizziness, memory loss,
and amnesia, and it can last months,
if not years, after the diagnosis.
But at the end of the day, it takes one,
a singular tip, that leads to her recovery.
I wasn't seeing a plan
from the SFPD
about what they were going to do to help find Sydney.
There wasn't anything proactive.
So we became proactive.
So, on October 9th, 2020,
we set up a "Find Sydney West" Facebook page,
Find Sydney West,
where we put out lots of information
and encourage people to share that
so that it could kinda spread
like wildfire across the country.
Eventually, we also put together
a findsydneywest.com website.
Facebook was and is great for communicating,
you know, quick, bits of information,
but if we had long videos or her music,
links to news articles, those kinds of things,
it really made sense to create a webpage.
That morning that Sydney was on the bridge,
there's a lot of people,
uh, that, uh, were near her.
Uh, I know this because I reviewed the video.
Uh, so we just... We absolutely believe
that somebody must know something.
So because it's almost four months now
and we are desperate to have our daughter back,
we are offering a $10,000 reward
to anybody who is able
to locate and bring her home.
The community in Chapel Hill really came together
for the West family.
And they had gatherings
where they were thinking, and praying
and trying to help the West family
as much as possible.
That was part of the reason why we did vigils,
to raise awareness.
But also to let people,
you know, share their thoughts
and come together.
[reporter] The family of Sydney West now offering
$25,000 for information
on where she could be.
Another suggestion that I made
was to look into setting up a billboard
in areas that would lead
to the Golden Gate Bridge where people would see that.
We were able to secure Berkeley
on the 80 heading in to the city,
and then also the 680 heading up into the city
from the south side of the bay.
So these are two huge highways
that lots and lots of people commute on,
and we were able to get great electronic billboard space
that looked amazing.
It was just like one other way
to, like, get the word out there.
So, we were getting the word out,
and there was news articles
and the reward was offered.
Lots of different tips would come in.
I got a whole bunch of texts
from somebody who was saying all kinds of awful things.
Sydney was pregnant.
It somehow went into,
"If you don't move quick enough,
she's not gonna be okay."
And then... That somehow
the person started telling me
that she was gonna be sent to Mexico
and her organs were gonna be harvested.
I sent the phone number and the screenshots
to the San Francisco Police
and discovered that
they were just trying to provoke me.
[Scott] With these type of investigations,
it's like being on a rollercoaster.
You spend all kinds of time
and it just doesn't lead to anything.
[Kimberly] I don't know if they're trying to get reward money,
if they were trying to just play a joke on us,
trying to just upset us, I... You know, I have no idea.
But it was just unfathomable
that there were people out there
who would do something like that
to a family that was in this situation.
We can't overlook those tips, but unfortunately
the tips that were giving us false information,
that they have her or they know her whereabouts
are related to getting the reward money
and those things.
They're really difficult to deal with.
One of the interesting things that came out of that
is we actually had multiple sightings from various people
that did not know each other from the Santa Cruz area,
which is a beach area.
I thought was probably a potential for a good lead.
Several people had saw her playing an instrument
and singing by a statue in Santa Cruz.
[Jay] Santa Cruz, California,
which is a surf town where I taught Sydney to surf.
And so it is a place that she loved.
This tip was one of the strongest leads
that I felt we were gonna find her.
[dramatic music playing]
[Kimberly] This tip was a little confusing
because this person that looked like Sydney
was in Santa Cruz,
she was playing the guitar.
I said, well, she never played the guitar
but maybe she learned how to play.
Or if she was traveling with someone playing the guitar,
and she was singing,
which made potentially more sense.
Her height, her hair,
they said she kinda looked like
she could've been homeless for a little while,
which could be consistent if she maybe had forgotten
where she had been or lost her memory totally.
We don't know exactly how Sydney's concussion
plays into her disappearance
but they can affect your memory,
and it can also lead to amnesia for months,
even years, after you get that concussion.
[Kimberly] We're able to get our,
you know, friends and family from California
to go down there to Santa Cruz
to try to see who this person was.
One good friend of mine did find
a woman playing the guitar with somebody else
that was kinda hanging out with her
who from the back maybe kinda looked like Sydney,
but she got some photos and everything,
and actually went up and talked to this people after.
And it clearly wasn't her.
So it was disheartening and frustrating,
and it just makes you feel like
you're not getting anywhere.
On November 5th, 2021,
I received a tip from an individual
who thought they saw Sydney West
outside of McDonald's
on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco.
They took some pictures of her.
I thought there was a resemblance.
I looked at the picture and said,
"My God, that looks exactly like her."
It was sort of like a young woman
who seemed maybe a little lost
or like something seemed a little off
that sort of raised the person's interest.
They sent us photos, but I saw the photo
and I was like, "I just... I feel like as a mom,
I just would like know, like, that's her."
And like I just... I just didn't feel like it was.
[Jay] In the end, we couldn't agree.
I mean, I think I eventually took her...
Took her opinion it wasn't her,
but it looked exactly like her.
Emotionally it's really difficult.
It's just incredibly challenging
even when the tips are credible.
[Scott] Now here were are,
two-and-a-half years later in this investigation,
and I think the most important thing
in regards to this is
let's not have people forget about Syd, you know?
They need to see her,
they need to understand
what the family's all about.
Her loved ones are still searching for her
two-and-a-half years later, 24/7.
[Kimberly] I definitely still have hope
that Sydney's out there.
But what I additionally have hoped for
is that there's somebody out there
who saw something and knows something.
That's what I'm really hopeful for,
is that there's somebody who can help us
figure out what happened.
Don't assume that you think
you know what happened to her and dismiss it
because nobody knows what happened to her,
including myself.
So don't assume that you think
based on your own circumstances
that you wouldn't be a help,
no, just keep an open mind and reach out.
[Jay] If you see her,
if you see the likeness of her, report it.
We just want her home with us.
This has been a horrendous tragedy for our family
and it's still just unbelievable to me.
Where is she?
Seeing what Jay and Kimberly and what Faith goes through,
to not to have her sister.
I don't know how they'll ever get over that.
How you move on.
It's so difficult to live your life
missing such a huge part of it.
Just wanna know where she is.
Want her back at home
and around people who love her,
and feeling that love.
[Jay] Being Sydney's father
is the greatest joy of my life.
And I loved every second of it,
and... And that's all I wanted her to become,
is just this wild kid
that would literally reach for her dreams.
And it's very important to me that people understand...
that it's not...
superhuman or anything,
it's just loving your kid.
So, please, help me find her.
[Kimberly] If or when I see Sydney again,
I would tell her that I love her,
and give her a huge hug
and not let go for a long time.
Sometimes people ask me about wanting closure.
And just to be very clear,
the only closure I ever want
is for my daughter to come home.
I'm okay walking this Earth the rest of my days,
looking for her,
if I could find her before the last day before I die,
I'm good.
Find your way home, Syd.
Find your way home.
[soft music playing]
♪♪
This missing persons case was unusual
and it continued to get more unusual.
This area is known for KKK, cults, underworld fighting.
Where is my baby and what happened to him?
Alex thought he was in some sort of communication
with something outside of this world.
We're trying to find Alex.
That island is scary and dangerous.
Like, this is life and death.
Just never think that this kind of thing
could happen to someone you know.
What does it mean when you have to someone
you are close to that you are hiding
from the rest of the people that you are close to?
Kristen did not run away.
She was abducted and taken.
And Kristen was being sold for $10,000 per night.
Unless it's your own daughter, nobody cares.
No one knows what happened to Dee.
Her children were money hungry.
They had been disowned.
[sobbing] The not knowing drives me crazy.
♪♪