Narrator: Nathaniel Holmes disappeared
on December 19, 2017.
He'd just vanished, and he was just nowhere to be found.
Inside my body I knew something was wrong,
and I knew that we needed to find him.
It is the worst feeling you can have as a mother,
to not know where your child is.
[narrator] His family is desperate for answers.
[Jake Severson] We started doing cocaine quiet frequently.
He would breakdown crying,
telling me he didn't know how to stop.
[Wendy] I think that he probably told us things
that we wanted to hear, or wanted to believe.
[voice breaking] And I think there's probably some things that we missed.
[narrator] This episode ofDisappeared,
retraces Nathaniel's last known steps.
One of my fears is that
somehow he got into these drugs
and ended up owing these people money.
It can be very dangerous for somebody
who hasn't been on the streets much.
This person on Oceanside said that a man asked to borrow her phone.
He just googled the name Nathaniel Holmes.
[Ben] I thought could this be him?
Could this be the day we find him?
[narrator] The more people who know Nathaniel's story,
the greater the chance of bringing him home.
[narrator reading]
[narrator] Help find him.
[narrator reading]
My name is Wendy Keadle and Nathaniel is my son.
The last time I saw him
was on December 19th, 2017.
And he's still missing.
Nathaniel lived in the Westminster,
Colorado area, since he was born
with his older two sisters and younger brother.
Nathaniel was a great brother to his siblings.
Him and his younger brother Seth played all the time.
He loved LEGOs.
He was always very respectful.
He was never argumentative. Just a very, very good kid.
All of his brother and sisters,
they all got along great
and they just had a good time.
My name is Ben Holmes,
and I'm Nathaniel's father.
Nathaniel as a child growing up,
he enjoyed music, hunting and travel.
He enjoyed doing a lot of things
in his earlier years,
you know, baseball and things like that
and unfortunately Nathaniel's mother and I divorced in 2009.
[Wendy] He was around nine years old.
It did affect him a lot.
He was very much a mama's boy,
and, um, it was very hard on him
to go through that event.
We tried as best we could
to make it as comfortable for him
and make him know that he was loved by both,
his dad and myself.
Nathaniel, as he got older
started to play the bagpipes like his father,
and that was really big part of his life.
[bagpipes playing]
He learned bagpipes at a remarkably quick rate
and he went from a very beginner status
to a very accomplished status
in, um, shorter period
than I have ever seen anybody else accomplish that.
One of my proudest moments of my life
was playing bagpipes with Nathaniel
at the Colorado Renaissance Festival,
playing a tune that I wrote, with my son.
It was amazing.
[bagpipes playing]
[Wendy] Nathaniel, he's very smart. He's very intelligent.
But school was something
that was kind of at the bottom of the list for him.
He would get bored and then it would just
kind of go sideways for him.
He was very bright,
and he would pick things up very quickly
but sometimes the pace was little slow for him.
So he would get distracted
and while he's interested in things,
he would get distracted from his scholastic endeavors.
[Wendy] So Nathaniel was not doing great in public school.
We thought that it was maybe too much pressure
or just too many people.
Just wasn't something that he enjoyed.
So, when he got into high school,
we did try online school,
which did not work because he was not self-motivated.
So we put him in a alternative school.
[Ben] At his point, Nathaniel was a junior in high school.
His school made promises
that he could catch up on classes,
that he would be on track for high school graduation.
So we were very positive
that he could, you know, get his diploma,
and move forward from there.
My son had a small group of friends
and he met a couple at his newer school
and I think they may have been a bad influence on him.
[Wendy] But he seemed to be lost focus,
and you could tell that maybe he was doing things
he shouldn't be doing.
We thought maybe he was dabbling
in some marijuana and some other things like that.
Monday the 18th, his behavior was quite unusual.
He came home and he was very definitely chemically altered.
I'd never seen him like this before,
and I talked to him about that,
and he said that he had tried some marijuana
and he took a Xanax.
[Wendy] His dad was very frustrated,
because we thought that Nathaniel was on the right path.
He had asked Nathaniel,
you know, where you're getting this?
What are you doing with this?
What are you doing?
And he just shut down.
And I said this isn't behavior that's tolerable.
You know, we can't do this kind of thing.
And he did get in, uh, quite a bit of trouble.
I was working that evening
so I sent him to his mother's to stay.
His dad did call me that afternoon
and said that Nathaniel had taken some Xanax pills,
so Nathaniel needs to stay with you tonight.
Talk to him. You know, kind of try
and get him in his right space.
So he came to the house, we ate dinner.
You could tell he was in a different zone.
And I said, "Nathaniel, you know, this is not the path for you.
You're too smart for this."
You know, we wanted to make sure that he was safe.
But I was concerned.
I did find a few pills in his wallet.
I didn't really even know what they were, quite honestly.
But I just took them from him, and I said,
"You know what, you don't need this."
And he got really, really worried.
Really almost scared,
and said I have to take those back to school.
He goes, "Mom, I... you can't take those."
And, uh, well, I did, and I hid them.
And I sent him to bed.
The morning of the 19th, I got Nathaniel ready.
Took him to school.
I sat in my car and I watched him
go through the school doors, and I left.
After I dropped him off, I went to work.
I would say around ten o'clock in the morning,
I got a call from Nathaniel.
He did not have a phone at that time.
I believe it was broken,
and we didn't get him another phone.
So he did not have any way to communicate with us
other than, you know, a friend's phone.
I just assumed that he has a friend's phone from school.
And he said his friend Michelle
was going to pick him up for ice-cream after school.
This was a friend of his father's
and I said, "Okay, well, I'm gonna give her a call
and if she's gonna pick you up, that's fine."
And he said, "Okay, I love you."
That was the end of that conversation.
So, immediately I called Michelle,
and I said, "Hey, Nathaniel said that
you're gonna pick him up for ice-cream?"
And she goes, "No, I haven't talked to him for a few weeks."
And I said, "Okay, that's weird."
And so then I called his dad, and I said,
"Hey, Nathaniel said Michelle was picking him up.
I'm gonna go to school an hour early and pick him up
and just make sure that he doesn't go out through the back door,
do something with his friends, or whatever is happening."
So, that's what we agreed upon.
So, I stayed at work
and about an hour before school got out.
I went into the school office and I said,
"Hey, I'm Nathaniel Holmes' mom
and I wanna pick him up from school."
And they just looked at me,
and said, "Well, Nathaniel didn't go to class."
And I said, "What?
I watched him go in to school."
And they said, "Well, he came to the office
after first period, and then he left."
That was the last time anybody saw Nathaniel.
The school had no idea where he went,
or what he did. They just know he wasn't in class.
So that's when I found out my son was gone.
And I said, "So my son walked in your school doors
at 7:45 a.m. and he's gone.
He's just gone, and I'm finding out at 2:30?"
And uh, they didn't really have much of a response to me.
I was visibly upset.
I was angry. I was angry at the school.
And so I left.
[Ben] I really fault the school for a lot of things.
They didn't inform me of anything.
They didn't inform me that he had left the school.
Had they done so, you know,
I would have had maybe a four-hour jump on
where he would've been. He would've been in the area.
And they said, "Look our policy is, you know,
we, we let the parents know that evening
that their kid wasn't in school."
And when I said that policy is problematic,
they got on the defensive,
and they wouldn't give me much other information.
[Wendy] I immediately called that number back
of the phone that he used and it was just a random lady
walking her dog in the park.
She said, "Yeah, he just asked to use the phone."
And she even said, she goes, "I knew he was lying to you,
but I figured he was just going to go do something."
[Ben] We started looking in places that he might have gone.
To the downtown area.
To other parks and I just was not able to find him at all.
And it was pretty immediately terrifying.
Probably around 5:00, we contacted the police
because he was a missing person at that point in my mind.
I'm detective Troy Gordanier,
with the Westminster Police Department.
And I'm the detective assigned
to the Nathaniel Holmes' missing persons case.
So the police department did receive a call
from Ben Holmes who is the father of Nathaniel Holmes
on December 19th of 2017.
An officer went to the house
and gathered some information from,
to try and figure out
the possibility of locating Nathaniel.
We also took the initial report
and, uh, learned
that Nathaniel had gotten in trouble
in the previous day or two
because there was marijuana that was found
also some prescription pills.
So, basically his dad had grounded Nathaniel,
uh, for a time.
And Nathaniel went to school,
and that's where he left the school
after his first class,
and just didn't return home.
And he didn't have a cell phone,
so the information was kind of limited.
Detectives contacted the school,
and was able to speak to the principal at the school,
because the information
we had was that the principal was probably
the last person that actually talked to Nathaniel
before Nathaniel went missing.
That's when detectives learned that Nathaniel had told him
that he was no longer gonna be attending
that school, that he was moving.
The principal told him just to go back to class,
and Nathaniel didn't.
Detectives followed up and they found out from both parents
that there was nobody moving anywhere,
and what Nathaniel told the principal wasn't true.
That was really confusing to me
because I don't know why he would say he was moving
and I don't know why I would not have gotten a phone call,
[scoffs] from the principal
saying, "Hey, Nathaniel's in my office
saying he's moving. He's obviously distressed."
But we did not get a phone call from the principal.
[Det. Troy Gordanier] So we believe he had a plan.
And he didn't tell anybody about his plan.
[Wendy] I was heartbroken.
At this point I was scared.
I wanted to believe
that it was going to be okay
and he would just show up at his dad's house
and that would be the end of it.
But I was so afraid for him.
Inside my body, I knew something was wrong,
and I knew that we needed to find him.
But I remember the night before he went missing,
when I found the pills in his wallet,
he had true fear in his voice when I had taken them,
and he wasn't a scared kid,
he was not afraid of anything,
that I think he was scared of something or someone.
That's what led him to leave.
[Ben] As soon as we realized that he wasn't at the school,
and he wasn't...
able to be found at the moment,
I was very concerned immediately.
He was never missing before.
My name is Hannah Holmes.
I am Nathaniel's older sister.
My name is Seth,
and I'm Nathaniel's younger brother.
[Hannah] In that moment I didn't really know what to think.
[Seth] It was very out of character for him.
It just happened all of a sudden,
and there's no word from him or anything.
Uh, he just disappeared.
[Hannah] I immediately posted to Snapchat, Facebook,
my little brother is missing. We don't know where he is.
He doesn't have a phone.
If anybody has seen him, call us, call the police.
My name is Jake Severson,
and Nathaniel Holmes is my close friend.
I met Nathaniel at our high school in 2016.
There's nothing I wouldn't do for him,
I mean, always considered him a little brother I never had.
That's why I spend so much time with him.
From my perspective,
Nathaniel was sort of sheltered
by his parents growing up.
His dad was very strict
and had high expectations of him.
I wanted to teach him things about the world
and teach him you know, more street smart.
He's so book smart, but he hadn't had a lot of real-world experiences
and that's what he had me there for.
Summer of 2017,
a lot of us, me included, started kinda doing drugs
and things like that.
A lot of us were doing cocaine quite frequently.
It just became really popular in that friend group,
and I think
in turn, might have influenced Nathaniel, too.
I think that he thinks, "Well, Jake and everybody else
is doing it. I wanna try it, too."
It really evolved quickly.
I went from just doing it here and there to,
we were doing it every day.
We were spending a lot of money on it.
It was towards the end of the summer,
I started trying to clean myself up quite a bit
because I, uh,
I kinda came to the realization
how bad off I was,
and I was trying to help him also,
because I started to worry about him.
He would breakdown crying
telling me, he didn't know how to stop.
He didn't know what to do.
He had asked me for help.
And I would tell him, like,
there was no way for me to help
because you gotta help yourself,
and you gotta want to be done with that.
And one day he would be like that,
then the next day he would be very gung-ho,
"Let's keep doing drugs. Why not?
Okay, what's the point not doing them, because life sucks anyway."
The day before he went missing he called me,
you know, see if he could... asking me to get him more drugs.
And he was crying and pleading with me.
I said, "Nathaniel, please just go to bed.
We'll talk in the morning.
There's not much we can do
at 11 o'clock at night right now."
And that was the last time I spoke to him.
And next day he went missing.
[Ben] Looking back on it now,
when he had gone to this new school,
he was a little bit withdrawn.
Maybe, it was, you know, beginnings of drug usage.
Um, I'm not certain.
[Wendy] I think during the time that Nathaniel struggled,
he did not open to me or his dad as much,
but you don't have a lot of control
when your child is 16-17 years old.
But I guess we thought we could get him over
this little bump that he was in his life.
He was so young.
He still had so much ahead of him,
that you know, we were just trying to make our way,
and I think that he probably told us things
that we wanted to hear or wanted to believe.
[voice breaking] And I think there's probably some things that we missed.
[Ben] My son have been missing for a day now.
I did go to some of his friends' house,
and I knocked, I said "Have you seen him?"
You know, "What's going on? Was he at school?
Did he talk to you? Did he say anything?"
And his friends all said, "No."
Nobody has been forthcoming with information.
It's all been very close-lipped.
[Jake] I remember I got a message from a friend,
who told me that Nathaniel was missing.
He was just gone, and nobody had heard from him.
And he wasn't answering his phone.
I remember couple of friends and I decided,
"Okay, we are gonna go out and we're gonna look for him."
Because we didn't think the police or his family
would be able to get much information
because a lot of people were afraid of incriminating themselves or others,
so they're not gonna give out a lot of information
when it comes to somebody who's on drugs.
They're gonna protect themselves,
so I figured if anybody could find him
it probably would be our friends and I.
And I remember we went around everywhere.
We went driving, looking everywhere for him.
But he was just nowhere to be found.
He'd just vanished.
And nobody knew a thing.
Nobody knew what could have possibly happened.
[Ben] One of my fears is that...
somehow he got into these drugs
and ended up owing these people money
and he feels that he can't come back.
He thinks that he's somehow keeping us from danger.
[Jake] Our friend group was almost kinda like a safety net for him,
where we protected him from...
how, sometimes outside drug dealers can be,
um, those types of people
can be armed, they can be very dangerous.
And so he did lean on me and other,
others to kinda keep him safe from those kind of people
because he didn't know how to deal with that.
But as Nathaniel's addiction started to get more severe,
I absolutely think he tried to find cocaine from other sources.
I think he, he felt like he could go on his own and try to find it,
and which may have led to him
making worse decisions or meeting the wrong people.
I never ever in a million years
would think my son would leave
on purpose. That he would leave
because, "I just wanna run away from home."
He-- There was nothing for him to run away from here.
So, something or someone scared him.
[Jake] I feel like he may have ripped off somebody,
he may have stolen from somebody,
stolen money, drugs,
and ran away to protect his family from those people.
Those type of people, they do, they go for your family.
They go for your people who are close to you.
And I think that Nathaniel
could have been trying to protect them.
[Wendy] Those first few weeks when Nathaniel was missing
my hope was that this is only gonna be a couple more weeks.
He'll be home by Christmas. Then, no.
Now he'll be home by the first of the year.
After a few months of him being gone
it even became more concerning to me
because it's like he disappeared off the face of the Earth.
He was just nowhere to be found.
[Jake] I just kind of held on
to hoping that maybe he would
be in contact with me or somebody else
so that somebody'll know that he was okay.
And there was nothing for weeks.
And for months.
Until one day,
I was at my house
and there was a well-known drug dealer
who lived in the same apartment complex as me.
And I'd seen Nathaniel going to her apartment.
I remember I called his dad.
And I told his dad, I'm like, you know,
"We need to get the cops here. We need to get somebody here,"
like, "I swear, I just saw Nathaniel here."
[Det. Gordanier] During April of 2018, Westminster Police Department
received a tip that Nathaniel had been seen
at an apartment on 60th Avenue.
Detectives followed up that and ended up speaking with friend of Nathaniel's
who said that Nathaniel had been hanging around this apartment complex.
And this apartment possibly had drugs
being used and sold out of the apartment.
So, detectives tried to follow up on that,
and unfortunately it didn't glean any information
that Nathaniel in fact was at that specific apartment
or had been around that complex.
People that detectives spoke with
said that they didn't know him
and hadn't seen him around there.
So that tip unfortunately didn't give us
any more information.
He did have that friend
and he did say that he saw him.
I'm not sure if he really believed that he did see him.
He would know him, if he did see him.
But, you know, my question always to people
who thought they saw him
is, "Why not stay with him, and call 911?"
Nobody would do that.
And that was probably
the biggest frustration for me,
but nothing ever became of it.
[Jake] Nathaniel knew where I live.
There were two doors to get out of the apartment complex.
There's a good chance he could have known that
I was home
and I could have saw him
and so he could have gone out the backdoor
and exited a different way
and gotten away a different route.
You know, it was night time,
so there was a good chance he could have snuck away.
There was also a good chance,
I could have not saw him at all.
It could have been hope in my mind
to see my friend,
and so I don't know for sure if that was him or not.
[Ben] We knew he would spent time with his friends
around downtown Arvada,
and there's a mix of people there.
Maybe some drug usage.
There's a large transient population as well.
[Wendy] I felt in my heart as a mom that he was not far.
I know my son is out there.
I'm Gregory Nieto. I've been a reporter
with Channel 2 and Fox31 for 23 years.
Olde Town Arvada has the water fountains,
ice-cream shops, now you have a magnitude of breweries,
a skate park.
It's definitely a spot for adults
and of course a lot of other teens to hang out,
and like lot of communities across the country,
it's become kind of a haven if you will, for,
for homeless adults and homeless teens.
[Jake] I know a lot of them, they like to hang out around
the same park where all of us kids did.
Lot of them were on drugs,
along with the rest of us.
I know whenever I was on drugs,
I had some friends who were down there in that area
who I would go to various houses and people's sheds
hanging out for hours
with people, some people I haven't met before.
So, I think there was plenty of places for him to hide down there.
The atmosphere around the homeless community,
especially for when you're dealing with, with kids
or very young adults,
it can be dangerous for them
because they don't really know who they're hanging out with.
There's drug use,
there's people stealing from each other.
It can be very dangerous for somebody
who maybe hasn't been on the streets much.
And with Nathaniel, the homeless community thing
for him was probably fairly new.
It could present challenges of being assaulted
or getting into other types of drugs,
and also he could possibly get into other criminal acts.
Some 1,000 to 2,000 people
are homeless or living on the streets of just Arvada itself.
So even if Nathaniel was in Arvada,
it might be tough to find him.
[Wendy] We go to Olde Town every single day.
Every road we drove down,
we always were looking for Nathaniel
because we felt that he had to close
and he had to be somewhere in there.
[Ben] But I didn't want to frighten Nathaniel away
if he was hiding with the transient population.
I bought a couple of different cars,
so I could do stakeouts in certain areas
and not be in the same car every day,
and none of that came to anything.
At other times, I would buy clothes at the thrift stores
and I would go in the homeless population
and dress down, just seeing
if anybody had known or seen him.
Just hoping that somebody would give us some lead.
But still no leads.
My mom and her friend and I,
we made little care packages for homeless.
Uh, we put his picture, our phone number,
um, in with it. It had just had some necessities,
uh, maybe the homeless people would want.
I thought even if they grabbed the picture,
just toss it on the ground and took what was there,
his picture was gonna blow somewhere,
somebody was gonna see it.
Let's find him.
[Seth] We drive by homeless shelters,
camps, anywhere where the homeless are,
trying to see if we could find him,
or if anybody knew any information.
[Ben] When your greatest hope is that your son
is wandering around with the homeless people,
that really says something about the situation you're in.
[Wendy] I was so afraid for him.
I wondered if he was hungry.
I wondered all those things you wonder as a mother.
It is the worst feeling you can have as a mother,
to not know where your child is.
[Hannah] A page was made for him on Facebook,
Bring Nathaniel Home, and there's thousands of people joined to this page
trying to find him.
And the posters were the same photo that,
because I wanted to make sure when people saw this photo they knew it was Nathaniel.
[Det. Gordanier] Because of the Facebook page,
on January 11th of 2020, this woman
with Safe Harbor Counseling, Weatherford Texas
contacted us, stating that
there was a young man that had gone into her office
and was selling bread.
He was very cordial. He was very nice.
Later that night she was home
and she was going through Facebook
and she saw a missing person
flyer on Facebook that was Nathaniel.
She looked at the photo
from the Facebook flyer
and based upon who she saw in her office,
she thought it possibly could have been Nathaniel.
Uh, so when she went back to work,
she looked through the video footage at the office.
She was able to get some still photos of this young man
and sent those to the detectives here in Westminster.
When I received that tip,
I thought it was the most credible one that we've had
and I thought could this be him?
Could this be the day we find him?
[narrator] Nathaniel Holmes was last seen
December 19th, 2017.
[narrator reading]
[Det. Gordanier] Safe Harbor Counseling said that it's not unusual
for members of
some of the local churches around there
who are helping people that have an addiction
or suffer from homelessness,
that the churches will send those people out to sell bread
so they can help make some money.
But looking at the photos that were provided,
it was hard to say if that was Nathaniel or not.
And so positive identification couldn't be made.
But detectives followed up with some of the churches
that were in the Weatherford, Texas area,
but they did not recognize Nathaniel as being associated with them.
[Wendy] He did have a uncle in Texas
and he was sort of familiar with that whole area.
I did see that picture but I do not think it was him.
I don't think it looked like him, enough like him.
He hadn't been gone that long and you would know your child
and I don't think it looked enough like him.
There's probably some resemblance,
just like the people who I stop on the street.
You know, it's enough to where you say,
"Hey, that could be him." But I did not think, it was,
it looked like him. No.
By the time Nathaniel's 18th birthday rolled around,
he had almost been missing for one year.
I never really thought I would be celebrating
his birthday without him.
Um, we all got together at my mom's house,
and we made his favorite dinner, and we got all of our
presents for him,
um, and put 'em in the middle
and... and it was really hard.
It's still hard, um...
celebrating without him.
It just doesn't feel right.
[Seth] And mom would still get him cake
and uh, presents, everything.
It's very hard doing that when he's not there.
[Wendy] We really never thought
he would be missing his 18th birthday.
Trying to wrap your head around everything that's happening
along with having your other children...
who have to live their lives also,
it's just... It's hard.
[Det. Gordanier] The longer time goes on, the information that we have
isn't fresh information.
It does start
to become a problem
when you're trying to locate somebody.
You don't have anybody else
that you can try and follow up with.
The longer somebody is gone,
it becomes quite the challenge to try and find them.
They could be anywhere.
[Gregory] When we first reported on the story
there was still that sense of him as a child,
but with the passage of time,
you're not only considered an adult
but, subliminally, I think
law enforcement looks as, someone who is 18, as an adult
and maybe has now the free will to do as they please.
[Jake] At that point I felt like he was still hiding.
I had had the thought to myself,
and I mentioned it to other people that.
Well, Nathaniel was 18
and with that Nathaniel knows, he's not stupid.
He knows, when he's 18, he can make his own decisions.
He can leave his house if he pleases
and he can be on his own.
[Ben] At this point I was very hopeful
that we would come across
Nathaniel being just with a transient population,
or hanging out with some of his friends
and somewhat embarrassed about having been caught.
I got in my car with my younger son.
We drove around downtown.
We drove around in Pueblo,
and in other states in nearby areas,
New Mexico, and Utah and Wyoming,
anywhere that I would think
that a transient population would gather.
It's amazing how many homeless places there were,
the little enclaves behind stores
uh, on the side of highways.
It's like finding a needle in a haystack.
So when I received the tip
via Facebook from a truck driver
that said that they had seen somebody
that was asking how to get to California.
I was immediately interested in this.
"On the morning of Saturday 27, 2021... [continues reading]
"... to ask me how long it would take to get to California.
Figured he was hitchhiking to California by truck.
So I told him at least ten hours." [continues reading]
"...go home and find a safe place to stay
and wait out his drugs instead of the area he was in that was sketchy.
It seemed to really upset him.
He snapped. 'I can't.
I got to get away from Colorado.'" [continues reading]
[Ben] This truck driver in New Mexico
went on to say that this man walked of
but she said that she did some googling
and found Nathaniel Holmes missing poster
from Westminster, Colorado.
She said, "I saw his photo
and I can't tell it was him for sure." [continues reading]
"It's also important it's about 500 miles
from Denver to Gallup, New Mexico.
While this may sound like a lot to the ordinary person,
truck drivers and trains can do a 1,000 easy in a day."
[Wendy] It did seem weird that she said "Nate."
Now, I think maybe his friends might call him Nate.
We as a family,
I have never called him
anything but Nathaniel.
But, if, you know, my thinking was
maybe he's changed his name to Nate.
But I don't know, so that seemed a little bit weird,
but you know it's always something you have to follow up.
[Ben] So immediately upon getting that tip,
we contacted the Gallup Police Department
and they went to search the area
within hours of the tip coming in
but it unfortunately was, you know,
six or seven hours after the encounter
that the tip came through the Facebook.
But we send the police looking around the area,
they looked at videos but nothing came of it.
[Wendy] When we got that tip,
it really did seem viable,
but you know, then, you know that hope is dashed,
and it's almost like,
you feel like the day he left, all over again.
[Ben] It's just great disappointment
after every lead comes to nothing.
It is soul crushing.
It's absolutely soul crushing.
[Wendy] At this point we were not getting very many leads,
and as a mother you will do anything
to try and find your child.
I have never really reached out to psychics or spiritual guys before
but I was trying to reach at straws.
And there was one person in particular
that sat with me and she talked about
seeing Nathaniel's light.
She said his light was dimming some
and that he was not in a safe place.
But he was alive.
She had pulled out a map and she looked at the map
and she had said that, "I see him in California."
And in September 2021, about three and a half years
after Nathaniel had been missing,
we got a tip that somebody had spoke with him in a park in Oceanside, California.
This person on Oceanside said that
a man walked up to her and asked to borrow her phone.
She said that he didn't use the phone.
He just googled the name Nathaniel Holmes.
[Ben] And then he handed the phone back to her
and walked off.
And she said it looked like it might have been him.
But couldn't tell.
[Jake] Knowing Nathaniel was always on Facebook,
and I think the first place he would check,
if he was interested
maybe it would be to see
what people were saying about him
or if anybody had any leads or anything like that.
He may have been interested
in trying to find out more information.
[Wendy] Ben called me and said that, "You know, I don't know,"
and I said, "You know, we got to go with your gut."
I thought it was credible and 16 hours later,
I was in Oceanside, California.
[Wendy] We had no idea, anything about California, or how big Oceanside was.
Well, by the time he got there I think the lady
who had originally messaged him
kind of ghosted him again.
[Ben] When I tried to give
you know, missing person posters to the police,
but they sort of scoffed at that
and said there are thousands of missing people
wandering around here.
We have thousands of transients.
And they didn't seem very forthcoming in trying to help.
So it came to nothing.
[Nieto] Any given time there are more than 150,000 homeless people
in the state of California.
When we talk about the number of homeless
encampments there in the state as well.
It would simply be impossible
for at least one individual
to fly out there and search for their son.
[Wendy] The worry and dread just continues to get worse.
And I feel like we tried everything.
Trying to live a normal life,
with a child missing is impossible.
We held the candlelight vigil on the five year anniversary of his disappearance.
We sent up little Chinese balloons
with different sayings and writings
and prayers to come home
and it definitely heartened me
to know that the community is still behind us
and still very hopeful.
[Wendy] I think as time goes on,
it gets harder because now we're at five and a half years,
Nathaniel is 22 years old,
and still nothing.
Still no sign of him. Still nothing.
It's a cold case.
[Ben] If you've seen or heard
of anything about my son, Nathaniel,
um, please just let us know.
Or you can contact the Westminster Police Department.
They're very thorough,
and they're very good at their job.
[Jake] If I could talk to Nathaniel,
I just want him to know that I would give anything
for him to come home,
and to show him how far I've come,
and to bring him up to that level with me,
and for him to live the wonderful life
I know that he was meant to live.
Nathaniel, we all love you and miss you,
and I really need you back.
Our life is not same without you.
Nathaniel, if you're out there watching this,
or if somebody shows this to you,
we just want you to know that we love you so much,
and all we want is for you to come home safe.
We are not angry at you.
We love you.
And we just need you.
The family is not whole without you.
[Wendy] I know my son is still alive.
I know my son is out there.
Part of our family is missing.
[voice breaking] Part of my heart is missing.
And until the day he comes home
it will remain.
We will never ever, ever give up hope.
We will never stop looking.
We will never stop searching.
That's what's important, is to bring him home.
♪♪
She wouldn't just take off.
What happened to her?
The bartender mentioned that she left with a guy.
It's our job to determine what happened.
No stone's been left unturned.
I think he thinks that he's above the law.
I think he thinks that he's untouchable.
Who's little girl is next?