On the night of May13, 2008, 19 year old Brandom Swanson from Marshall,
Minnesotawent out with some friends to have a few drinks and some fun.
It was a Tuesday night but Brandon had just completed his first year of Minnesota West
Community and Technical College that day so he and
his friends went to the nearby town of Lynd to hang out and celebrate.
Between 10:30 and 11:00 pm Brandon left the friends he originally set
out with and drove to another friend’s house in Canby to say goodbye to yet another friend.
His friends who were with him in Lynd said that when he got into his car to make the short dive
he wasn’t intoxicated and other witnesses who saw him that night all agree he was
not by any means intoxicated when he arrived at the friend’s house either.
They said he had one shot of whiskey and then left sometime after midnight to head back to Marshall,
presumably he was headed home at that point.
The direct route from Canby to Marshall is a 30 minute drive on Highway 68.
Technically the next day on May 14th at around 1:30 in the morning,
Brandon got his car stuck in a ditch along a gravel road.
He tried calling multiple friends for help but unfortunately no one answered the calls
and Brandon remained stuck on the side of the road.
Around 1:54am Brandon called his parents and told them where he was and what had happened
and asked if they could come and get him as he needed a ride home.
His parents, Annette and Brian Swanson agreed to come and pick him up
and asked where he was so they knew where to go to find him.
He told them he was between Marshall and Lynd and
he assured them he wasn’t injured at all but just wanted to get home.
When his parents arrived at the location Brandon had given them,
he wasn't there and was nowhere in sight either.
His mother called him on his cell phone and the two decided
to each start flashing their lights to alert the other of where they were.
They all assumed at this point that they must have been very close to one another
but were just missing the other one somehow.
Annette could hear her son flashing his lights and she informed him she was doing the same.
She told him,
“We’re flashing our lights! We’re flashing our lights!”
To which Brandom replied, “Don’t you see me?” Both Annette and Brandon were very frustrated
at this point and Brandon ended up hanging up on his mother.
She immediately called him back with the intention of apologizing
to him for getting worked up a bit herself.
Brandon answered and told his mother that he could see the town’s lights,
referring to Lynd, and that he was going to just start walking in the direction of town.
He told her to just meet him in the parking lot of a local tavern
in the town of Lynd. She agreed to meet him there.
As his parents drove to the tavern they maintained
contact with Brandon with Brian staying on the phone with him.
Brandon told his father he was going to cut through some fields to take a kind of short cut
and save some time on his trip since he was walking.
Along the way Brandon was telling his father over the phone what he was seeing and passing.
He walked on gravel roads, saw two fence lines and heard running water.
About 47 minutes into the call Brandon yelled, “Oh Sh&*!!!!” and the call disconnected.
Brain Swanson later said it sounded as though his son had fallen down or slipped.
Brian and Annette tried repeatedly to call Brandon back but he never answered the phone again.
It rang and rang all the way until sometime the next day when the calls
started going straight to voicemail and it was assumed the phone had died.
Brandon Swanson hasn’t ever been seen or heard from since the end
of that fateful call with his father that night.
That same morning, May 14th,
2008, Brandon’sparents called the police to report him as missing.
As is usually the case, the police didn’t take the call very seriously
and insisted they wait a little while as it wasn’t unusual for young men Brandon’s age
to go missing voluntarily for a little while without telling their parents.
Later on in the day cell phone records for Brandon’s phone were retrieved and
they showed his last pings were from near Porter, Minnesota which is about
25 miles away from where he seemed to have thought he was in Lynd.
There is no way the town he saw was Lynd.
Shortly before noon the authorities began their official search for Brandon.
At around 12:30pm his vehicle, a Chevrolet Lumina,
was found in a ditch bordering the towns of Lincoln and Yellow Medicine.
Lincoln County Sheriff Jack Vizecky stated that the ditch was positioned where Brandon
wouldn’t have been able to gain any traction to be able to drive himself out of it.
There was no visible damage to the vehicle and no signs of foul play or injury at the scene.
In the months following his disappearance, law enforcement conducted searches on horseback,
using all terrain vehicles and even employed foot searchers but to no avail.
They even utilized search dogs and searched around and near several bodies of water.
The dogs ended up leading their handlers to the edge of the Yellow Medicine River
which led authorities to come to the conclusion that Brandon had somehow fallen into the water.
This led them to conduct extensive searches in the river but they came up empty every time.
Because of this, they then concluded that while Brandon did fall into the water,
he must’ve made his way back out of it at some point and didn’t drown.
They believed he just got himself out of the river and continued on his way walking.
Their conclusion then was he must’ve died of hypothermia due
to the temperature dropping below 40 degrees on the night he went missing.
Search dogs also alerted to human remains being near Mud Creek,
however authorities never found any remains at all in this area, let alone Brandon's.
Authorities believed Brandon could have been
anywhere within a 122 square mile radius of the river.
Ten years after he seemingly disappeared into thin air,
the Yellow Medicine County Sheriff Bill Flated said, “It's a huge area.
If you take that immediate area where the car was and then the time frame when he was talking
on the phone with his parents, who knows what direction he went and how far he traveled?"
A volunteer firefighter named Darrin E. Delzer
came up with his own theory as to what could have happened to Brandon.
He took everything he had learned about the case and put it all together.
He noted that Brandon always wore glasses because he was legally blind in his left eye.
However, on the morning he went missing he had left his glasses in his car.
Based on Darrin’s theory, we can assume Brandon also left them in his car when
he left it in the ditch to start walking to go and meet his parents and therefore
wasn’t wearing them the whole time he was on the phone with his parents that night.
He made a note of the fact that right before Brandon said, “Oh SH*&!!” and
possibly slipped when the phone disconnected for the final time, he said, “Not another fence!!”
He concluded that Brandon must have fallen into an unmarked well or cistern
which are very common in rural areas like the one where Brandon went missing.
There are theories such as Brandon left on purpose and orchestrated his whole disappearance.
This theory alleges he is living under an assumed identity somewhere.
Most people don’t give this theory much credit as, if you remember, Brandon was
calling his parents and several friends that night trying to find someone to help him.
It makes more sense he really was trying to get help that
night and not trying to purposefully disappear.
Theories of Brandom suffering some kind of nervous or mental breakdown
also don’t hold much water as his parents say he was lucid while on the phone with them
and also that he has no history of any kind of mental illness.
The initial theory that he had drowned and the theory that followed stating he may
have made it back out of the water and died of hypothermia has been highly criticized as well.
His phone was working for quite a while after the call with his father had disconnected.
It’s been said that if the phone had entered the water, which it presumably would have since
Brandon was holding it when this theory states he went into the water, it would have immediately
started going to voicemail right away as it wasn’t waterproof and would have been immediately broken.
Sure, some counter that by saying the phone could have fallen onto the ground when Brandon
slipped into the water but if that was the case, then why was the phone never found?
There were extensive searches in and around all of the bodies of water in a large area
surrounding where Brandon’s car was found and where he alleged he was the night he went missing
so it’s safe to assume here that the phone would have been found at some point. It wasn’t.
All of the abandoned buildings in the area were also searched
and no human remains and none of Brandons personal effects were found in any of them.
This discredits the theory that Brandon might have sought refuge and shelter
in one of them and died some other way while inside.
Another theory is that perhaps Brandon was involved in a hit and run or otherwise abducted
and that his remains were disposed of by someone else.
However there is no evidence at all to prove this theory
or that foul play was involved in any way in Brandon’s case.
Brandon’s parents believe their son’s disappearance might have been solved had
police immediately started investigating instead of telling them to wait it out.
There is no law that says there needs to be a
waiting period for someone to be able to be reported as missing.
However, unofficially of course, priority is usually given to cases where foul play is
obvious, where people are mentally or physically impaired and when younger children are involved.
A missing 18 year old who had disappeared after a night out drinking with some friends just didn’t
seem too important to the police until hours after the fact and so much precious time was wasted.
Annette and Brian Swanson proposed a law be written up in their son’s name.
Brandon’s Law would, “require law enforcement to take a missing persons report without delay after
notification of someone missing under dangerous circumstances, no matter the missing person's age;
immediately conduct a preliminary investigation to determine if the person is missing, and whether
the person is endangered; and promptly notify all other law enforcement agencies of the situation.”
Brandon's Law, which was sponsored by former House Minority Leader Marty Seifert and Senator Dennis
Frederickson, was signed into law by Minnesota's then-Governor, Tim Pawlenty, on May 7, 2009.
The law officially went into effect on July 1, 2009.
This still leaves one very big question though?
What happened to Brandon Swanson?
How could he have been so off about where he was when he was telling his parents he was near
Lynd and they were flashing their lights at each other but not seeing one another?
What led him to yell the expletive into the phone and hang up?
Why was his phone or any of his other belongings ever found?
There has literally been no trace of him since the last time he was
heard shouting into the phone that fateful night.
These are all questions we may never know the answers to
but that doesn’t ever mean we should stop asking the hard questions.
As always our hearts, prayers and thoughts go out to the loved ones of not only Brandon Swanson but
the countless others who have seemingly vanished off the face of this earth without a trace.