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 When I was in high school, a 13 year old boy in my neighborhood went missing.  The rumor going around my high school was that he was living on South Mountain, which overlooked the city of Phoenix. Adjacent to this rumor were more rumors that other kids were helping him survive by brining him food and supplies. His aunt, however, was my mother’s coworker, and she insisted that he’d been murdered by his best friend. My mother and I used to fight about this. She believed the aunt, and I believed the rumors at school. In my senior English class, another student got into a screaming match with the teacher over his insinuation that Brad was dead.  Through hysterical tears, she insisted he didn’t know what he was talking about and that she KNEW the people who were helping him survive! 

In 2018, I returned to South Mountain to hike with my former boyfriend and his two kids. In the 1990’s, the only part of South Mountain you could really hang out at was the very top. But now over 20 years later, there were several parks along walking trails that had not been there before. I walked around, meditated while looking out at the city, and Brad entered my mind. In 2018, he would have been 36 years old. There were so many people on South Mountain now for leisure, that there wasn’t any way he’d possibly still be there. 

I didn’t know yet, but they had actually proven Brad’s death by finding over an inch of his blood in his best friend’s family trash can. No one would survive that much blood loss. That’s the main way a person is proven deceased without finding a body. I didn’t find this out until quite a while after my trip to South Mountain with the kids. I wish I had known it in the 90’s when I would fight with my mom over it. 

This documentary talks about Brad Hansen and Jeremy Bach starting at about the 35:30 mark. There really isn’t any part of me anymore that hopes Brad is still on the mountain. Not with that kind of proof. If there wasn’t the blood evidence, though, I would still have hope. Maybe Brad’s case and its proximity to my life at the time in so many ways is part of the reason why I’m so passionate about keeping hope that missing people could still be alive. Despite being wrong about Brad, I don’t give up when it comes to others.