Cameron Sequeira Part 1: Missing on the Mountain
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His dog and him were missing. He had handed the baby over to Louise for the night, and supposedly him and his dog went to go for a walk. And that was it. The dog came back the next Monday, but without him. He didn't have his collar on. There was no leash on him. Zero was the name of the dog. Him and Zero were inseparable. I mean, that dog slept next to him. I mean, that dog ate with him. That dog did everything with him. That was his buddy.

This honestly changed my life. Not gonna lie, I lost everything over this. I've had 14 years to think about this and I've thought about it every day. You have no idea on how much I lost. I've been messed with by family, by a lot of people, okay? I've been harassed. I've been accused of murder.

It was late June of 2010 when 32-year-old Cameron Sequeira disappeared from Forest Lakes, Arizona.

The story was that Cameron left his young daughter with one of his girlfriend's relatives, then went for a walk with his beloved dog, Zero. Zero returned a couple of days later, but no one ever saw or heard from Cameron again. His parents, who were now living in the Pacific Northwest, were alerted that their son was missing. They traveled to Arizona to aid in the search efforts for Cameron, but something wasn't adding up about the whole situation.

And more than 14 years later, they're still piecing together the clues to figure out what happened to their son. I'm Marissa, and from Wondery, this is episode 461 of The Vanished. Cameron Sequeira's story, part one, Missing on the Mountain.

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From the very beginning of Cameron Sequeira's life, he faced significant challenges. And Cameron's father, Frank, said that things were touch and go from the start.

He was born three months premature. He was born with medical problems, but he managed, he survived because he was born without one eye, had scoliosis real bad on his spine. You know, it was tough for him the first couple years because he had learning disabilities. He was hard of hearing.

Cameron's mother, Doreen, explained that despite the challenges her son faced, he was a fighter. And not only that, the adversity that Cameron was up against made him kinder and more empathetic to the struggles that others endured. He was born in Hayward, California, the Kaiser system there in Hayward, but as soon as the moment that he was delivered, we handed him over to Oakland Children's Hospital up on Pale Hill in Oakland because his son,

aunt was charge nurse at the time. So they brought their big truck with their ICU and everything because I had a son about five years before Cameron who passed away two days before my due date. So I was very leery of the Kaiser system. So we made sure that Cameron would be taken care of, definitely, that Oakland would be there.

and take care of him. And he was very much preemie back in 1977. He was two pounds, 10 ounces when he was born. Three months, I think he was when he was first born, he was in there. He got jaundice and all those little things that go along with being a preemie. And he was born with some scoliosis. It wasn't to the point where he couldn't walk or anything, but he had pretty good

curvature of the back. He was also born without a right eye. I was hit in the stomach. A rock came flying over the fence really early on in my pregnancy. It hit me in the stomach and it hit me hard. So we're not sure if any of that had something to do with the way Cameron turned out. But anyway, from there, we had issues we had to treat, of course. And he

He got a prosthesis in his eye. He had Dr. Dance, who was his eye doctor at the time, put his name on his eye. So it would say Cameron. So he would go to school and he would take out his prosthesis. And I didn't know this, but he would take out his prosthesis and show all the kids at school for a dollar, his name on his eye. He was one of these kind of kids.

He would always try to make light of things. You know, he was just one of those kind of souls where if there was something bad, he would try to make it positive. So that's just who he was. He enjoyed baseball collecting, baseball cards. He got to be the bat boy at the Oakland A's game. He was a good kid, always was, but he'd be the first one to open the door if he had a handicap of any kind.

He would be the first one right there. If he saw somebody who was having struggle with a grocery bag and they couldn't walk, he'd be the first one to help them. I mean, he would just say, mom, wait and go right off and help them and come back.

He was just that way. And I think it's because of his disabilities that he had that compassion that it takes for others to care about others. There was always lasting effects and then not having the one eye. Kids make fun of you, the whole thing. But he always just smiled at the kids when they battered him. And that's when he'd take out his eye and go, yeah, well, you don't got your name on your eye. You know, that kind of thing.

When Cameron was born, his family lived in California, but later they decided to relocate to Arizona, where Cameron spent most of his formative years. California was getting really crazy, so we moved to Glendale, Arizona, which I call Phoenix. So we moved there, and we lived there for about 12 years or so, but his schooling, most of his schooling and everything was done in Arizona.

Doreen explained that while Cameron was growing up, he was doing all the things that kids do. And then one day, tragedy struck. Pretty normal life up until he was about nine. And then he got hit by a car. He was riding double with a friend on 51st Ave in Phoenix, Arizona, head on by a truck going 45.

And their shoes were found over the next house into the next fence. And yeah, it was a bad one. It was really a bad one. Swelling of the brain. The whole nine yards. I had to have pelvic surgery for like a six-hour surgery to put his bones back together. So that pretty much left him out of school for that entire year. We had to have a hospital bed at the house and physical therapy at the house. And him and his friend both nearly died from that.

He had a pretty rough start being born preemie and then the car accident. But he was always a fighter. He homeschooled a little bit. He wasn't a straight-A student or anything like that. And then after the accident, that was even harder. What happened, though, was when after that accident, the traumatic brain injury, I believe...

After Cameron's accident, Doreen and Frank decided it was time for a slower pace of life, and they moved up to the mountains of Arizona.

We had moved from Phoenix up to that little town called Forest Lakes. It's in Coconino County, up on the Mogollon Rim in Arizona. Once he moved up there, population was not as much as down in Phoenix. But maybe about two years after his accident, we moved up to the mountains. And then from there, he stayed there. He loved it up there. We also spoke to one of Cameron's longtime friends, Rebecca, who told us how they met and why she always cherished her friendship with Cameron.

I met Cameron when I was 17 years old. Cameron was a little older than me. I want to say he was in his early 20s. And I knew him up until the day he disappeared. I'm still very close to his family, his mom and his dad. So I've known them for over 20 years. Cameron was the son of Frank. And Frank, he had a motorcycle shop in my hometown. And I was dating a guy that went to work for Frank.

And so I spent almost every day of my senior year of high school hanging out with Cameron and Frank and my boyfriend, just working on motorcycles and, you know, kind of just chilling at the shop. And

And then later on, I was also a waitress at this little restaurant in town. And Dory, Cameron's mom, came to work there as a waitress, too. So that's when I got really close with her as well. So I'm really, really good friends with everybody in the family. I knew them for a really long time. They're really good people.

Cameron was this little, short, kind of spunky guy. Me and him became friends because I was probably the only person in town he could call shorty, you know, because I was shorter than him. He was friendly. He was kind. He was quiet. He would open up and joke around and stuff like that. We got to know each other. He had a really big heart. He really cared about people. He was just a really good guy. He was fun to be around, fun to hang out with.

He would do various jobs. So when his dad had the shop, he was working on motorcycles and working for his dad. And then after his dad kind of closed the shop down and retired, then construction is a really big industry in my hometown. And so, yeah, he went to work for different construction companies doing handyman services and things like that.

Doreen always worried about her son doing laborious work with his health issues, but she said he wasn't one to let that stand in his way. He did some construction work. The scoliosis, that was very, very painful for him. He had a lot of pain from the scoliosis. He wouldn't let his disabilities, as much as, you know, moms are how we get. Honey, no, don't do that. You're going to hurt. You're going to hurt.

oh, it's okay, mom, I'll push through it. And he did. He just always did. And finally, I would give up when he turned 20 or something. He's going to do what he's going to do. He was just that kind of kid who just pushed through the pain. In fact, he pushed through the pain so bad one time. He was up in Forest Lakes at the time. He was up on the roof. He

He had a heat stroke on the roof and they had to grab him and put him down on the ground and they rushed him over to the hospital. He was having seizures. He always just pushed himself to the limit. And he was on medication several different times. And then he'd say he doesn't like it, he'd get off him again. And that would be mostly just pain meds.

Then after the accident, probably about four years after that, he started developing those little bit of anger issues of not being able to control the temper thing and went to a doctor for all that. And they put him on another antidepressant and he wasn't a pill taker. So he would take them, but he wouldn't take them continuously. So I don't really think that we went anywhere with the medication part of it.

Rebecca said that as she got a little older and life got busier and busier, she didn't see Cameron as much. And later she moved out of the area, but they still kept in touch. When I was in high school and stuff, I would see Cameron almost every day. Once I graduated and...

His dad closed down the shop. Then I would still see him maybe a couple times a week because I still worked with his mom. As we got older, I actually had a son and I would bring my son over to see his parents and to visit him. And he lived in an apartment above the garage of his parents' house. So then it got more sporadic once a month or something like that. And then I would say in 2008,

Years before Cameron disappeared, he happened to meet a woman named Kelly. She was in a bad place in her life. But Doreen said that Cameron wanted to help her. That was just part of his nature.

He actually did find her in a gutter in Payson, Arizona. It was a rainy day. And here was this little mouse of a wet, soggy, drug addicted child. And like I said, he was always the one who wanted to help everybody and thought he could save the day, you know. So he did. He brought her home.

And that's when we had a vote. And he said, Mom, can we help her? She's homeless. She doesn't have food. She was like 90 pounds of fat. And we could tell instantly she was into drugs. I mean, you could just tell. We were a drug-free family. But we took a vote. Frank said no. Cameron's dad said absolutely not.

She's in drugs. We won't have this. We won't. Cam said, come on, we can't just let her just throw her back on the street like a dog. Can't do that. So me and Cameron had helper votes and Frank was ousted. So that's the beginning to his end. At first, he wasn't loyal to her. I think he was loyal to the fact that he just wanted to clean her up. He just wanted to have that mission in life to save her. And then I think little by little, of course, he began to like her, then love her.

For Frank, from the start, he never liked Kelly, and had a bad feeling once she came into the picture.

Oh, I didn't like her from the very beginning because I knew she was bad. She needed a place to live. Cam got her to straighten her crap out for a while. One time, she disappeared on a Friday night and shows up Monday morning where it looked like somebody drug her up and down the street. She knew...

I didn't like it because I went into the shop because Tam and her were living in a trailer behind the shop. Monday morning, she shows back up in her face. I mean, it was like road rash all over. I was sitting at my desk and all of a sudden my bathroom door opens and it's her. She knew I didn't like that.

Cameron's story was set to be a single episode. We had attempted to get in touch with Kelly to hear her side of things. At first, she seemed interested. But then she said she was sick, and we stopped hearing from her. So we thought she decided against participating. But then, early last week, she began calling again and wanted her side of the story to be told.

Kelly said that she had a rough childhood. She didn't have a solid foundation. And in a way, that was something that Cameron tried to provide for her. Here's Kelly on her relationship with Cameron.

I was very young and I was 16. I was married. I was raised by my great-grandma and grandpa. Very old-fashioned. I was 16 and a half. I was already married. Relationship did not work out. I'm technically an adult. And my great-grandpa and grandmother approved of Cameron. Cameron was very strict, but he took care of me. He wasn't like that to be mean. He was like that

to protect me. I was young and stupid, not gonna lie, but I loved him. It was on my heart, not gonna lie. I loved him. I can say Cameron was my first love. He had brain trauma.

I can't say he was crazy. He was different. He was one of a kind, very old fashioned. Women should be bare feet and pregnant. Very old fashioned, very one of a kind. He was Cameron. Yeah, we fought. We had our problems, but who don't? You can't judge. Don't judge. That man loved me. I loved him.

As time wore on, Doreen came to realize that her efforts to help Kelly weren't working. But her son was in love with her, and she couldn't control his relationship choices. So she tried to make the best of it. Years went by, and we tried helping her. And we all understood after a while we weren't going to be able to do anything for her. But we lived that life. Because Cameron and I fell in love with her now. It was his life. So we stopped interfering, basically. We put food on the table and stuff for them, but just stuff like that.

I think that the first couple years were actually pretty good. They got along together well. They went fishing all the time. They were close. They were really close. But I know that Cameron was always struggling with her because of the drugs. He would work and wouldn't hand her the paycheck or anything like that. But he definitely loved her and he would have done anything for her. But she was definitely taking advantage of him. I don't even want to say that in the same sentence with his name. But yeah, she knew she had a roof over her head.

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In 2008, Cameron and Kelly had a daughter together, Sabrina. Doreen was alarmed during Kelly's pregnancy and attempted to intervene as much as she could for the health and safety of her granddaughter.

Through that whole entire pregnancy, from the moment we found out, she was never left alone. She stayed clean for that entire pregnancy. And I mean, never left alone. If Frank wasn't with her, I was with her. If I wasn't with her, Cameron was with her. We each had made up our minds that we would not let her have a baby and have this baby go through drug withdrawals on its first couple of days of life. Thank God Sabrina didn't have to go through all that stuff.

Cameron, Doreen, and Frank did what they could to shield Sabrina from the effects of drug use during pregnancy. While it proved to be a trying time for the entire family, once Sabrina was born, the worry they carried for nine months was replaced with joy, and Doreen witnessed her son instantly become a proud and doting father.

When he was younger, he got another girl pregnant and her mother was so upset with her getting pregnant that she sent her to Florida. So Cameron was falling in love with his little boy that was born and then the little boy was gone with Sabrina. I mean, he had a smile that was permanent on his face like it was tattooed. He was so ecstatic about having her. He was just always, the day she was born, it was an emergency C-section and

God, he just would go inside the nursery all cleaned up and everything and holding this baby and just holding her up to the window. Look, Mom, look, Mom. He was very, very happy. Kelly said that she was still quite young when Sabrina came into the world, but she still remembers the day that her daughter was born like it was yesterday.

I got pregnant with Sabrina around my 19th birthday. I had her on April 2nd of 2008, around 9.45 in the morning. Beautiful little girl. Oh, she was so beautiful. I can say I've had four kids and Sabrina was the most beautiful baby he loved.

His daughter. His daughter was his life force. That was his baby girl. His daughter was his everything. Cameron's friend Rebecca would periodically travel back to the Forest Lakes area to visit her family. During those trips, she would make sure to see Cameron, Frank, and Doreen. She recalled the last time she saw Cameron, and it was after the birth of Sabrina. Rebecca said that becoming a father transformed Cameron.

I think the last time I saw Cameron was in 2009. I had come back home for a visit with my family and I had gone over to his parents' house to visit him and he was there with his daughter, Sabrina. She was a baby. She was tiny.

Cameron was a great dad. He loved Sabrina and he was very doting. He took care of her when I was around. He was proud to be a dad and he was proud that that was his baby. He loved her. His face lit up when he would hold her, when he would talk about her. He loved her a lot.

According to Doreen, Cameron became the primary caregiver of Sabrina, due to Kelly's struggles with substance abuse around this time. Though Doreen admits that Kelly had a tough childhood, and that was likely a contributing factor.

The whole time I was around, I never once saw Kelly change a diaper. She just wouldn't do it. She never fed her. She never did anything. Kelly did what Kelly was going to do. So Cam had to work, earn a paycheck, and take care of his baby. And they were on food stamps, too, by this time. Kelly's mom was on meth. So when Kelly was born, she just handed her baby off to the great-grandmother. Her name's Louise.

Prior to Cameron's disappearance, Doreen and Frank moved from Arizona to Oregon. Cameron began planning to make that big move as well. But then he started to become a bit distant with his parents. Doreen wasn't able to piece it together at the time, but she later came to understand what was going on back in Arizona. We decided to move here to Oregon. And Cameron actually had come up here with plans to move up here. I had no idea what was going on.

I had Cam and Kelly and the baby come up here to Oregon, and they loved it. And they were going to live here. Then they were going home, and they were going to start making plans and stuff to move. But Kelly never seemed interested. Cam was ready. He needed help with the baby, and she was not going to help. She spent most of her time out on the streets anyway. He was looking forward to the help and stuff, but...

It fell through, I guess. I mean, I don't know that whole side of the situation. But, you know, after they went back home, within eight months, nine months, Cam was gone. What I didn't understand at the time is that Cameron wouldn't ask us for help because Kelly was telling him that we didn't want nothing to do with him. I found this out after. But I wondered why Cameron had been so distant before.

Cameron was concerned about the safety of his daughter. He kept a watchful eye over her and didn't want any of what Kelly was involved in to bring harm to Sabrina. In the lead-up to Cameron's disappearance, they were living on a property owned by Kelly's great-grandmother, Louise. On this property, there was a main house where Louise lived, then other buildings that family members resided in. Doreen explained this further.

Louise and her husband had a cabin, and on the property there was the main house, which was the cabin. There was Cameron and Kelly's trailer, and there was another trailer on that property owned by a fellow named Ryan Lundgren.

Every single night, Cameron would go to the main house and give Sabrina up. He didn't like her sleeping in the trailer. He wanted her safer in the house. So he always took her every night around nine o'clock. He would knock on the door. Louise would open it. He'd give the baby over. Louise would take care of the baby, put Sabrina in her little crib.

And then every morning he would pick up the baby and start the day off again. But he was very protective of her. But he was struggling at this point in time. And being a mom, you know, kids don't always talk to you. He was always really good about talking to us about if he needed help and things like this. But we hadn't realized that Kelly had turned him against us. Since Cameron was the main person caring for Sabrina, he was also juggling how to support his growing family.

When Sabrina was born, he had a paycheck, but he was having trouble finding work. He would do odd jobs here and there when he could, and then Louise would watch the baby sometimes. So this is what Cameron's day-to-day life looked like in 2010. He was trying to hold it all together for his daughter and work enough to make ends meet. Frank said it was Friday, June 25, 2010, that Kelly called him looking for Cameron.

The Friday before Cam disappeared, Kelly calls me on Friday evening saying that Cam would usually call her and he hadn't called and then he ended up being gone. He disappeared June 26th. She said he's always been there to call her or whatever and she wanted to know if I'd heard from him.

What's strange about this is that according to police reports, Cameron was not yet missing when Kelly began calling his parents. Doreen said the whole set of circumstances was strange to her because Kelly called them from a rehab center after Cameron was only 30 minutes late calling her, and her sense of urgency seemed exaggerated for the situation as far as what she was telling them at the time.

She supposedly checked herself into rehab in a town called Show Low for drugs. That is just so not Kelly. But supposedly she had checked herself into this rehab and Cameron was to call her every day at 530. And it was about six o'clock when I got a phone call that evening stating that

Mom, you know, Cameron, he's not here. He's gone. He's gone. I don't know where he's at. He didn't call me at 530. He didn't call me at 530. But it's six o'clock, Kelly. Come on. I mean, maybe he went off fishing, you know, whatever. He'll call you. Don't worry about it. So I didn't think anything of it. It was like, all right, just calm down. He's fine.

She really was overreacting. I see that now. I didn't see it then. And then a half hour later again, she calls, oh no, I've got this bad feeling something's wrong. And I just kept going, Kelly, no, he's fine. He's fine. And I figured, you know, Cameron was the kind of guy who, if he wanted to go fishing, he didn't have far to go. There was tons of lakes up there and he loved to just hike. He loved to be out there with his dog and he loved to go fishing. So I'm thinking nothing's bad.

Frank and Doreen would soon learn that things were not fine and Cameron was actually missing. According to police reports, Cameron was not missing on the 25th when Kelly phoned his parents. On June 27th, Kelly's great-grandmother, Louise, called the Coconino County Sheriff's Office about a possible missing person. She said that on Saturday the 26th, which was the day after Kelly had called Frank and Doreen from rehab, Cameron came by Louise's house around 8 p.m. to drop Sabrina off.

When Louise went to wake Cameron after he failed to pick up Sabrina as he always did, she found he was missing from his trailer. His dog Zero was also nowhere to be found.

Louise reported that she had no idea where Cameron was, but that he didn't seem upset or mad when she last saw him. The deputy told Louise that he would drive around looking for Cameron. The report states that he and a Forest Service officer both drove around for approximately two hours looking for any sign of Cameron, but they were unable to locate him in the area. The deputy informed Louise that he couldn't take a missing persons report at that time because

because there were no unusual circumstances, and they would have to wait until Cameron had been missing for at least 24 hours. Louise said she would have Kelly call when she got back from rehab. The following day, June 28th, Kelly called the sheriff's office, and an officer came out to speak with her. She said that according to her great-grandmother, Cameron's dog Zero had returned without him that morning around 8 a.m. Zero didn't have his collar or chain on either.

Kelly explained that she thought Cameron may have gone out into the woods and taken his own life. When asked if Cameron had taken anything with him, Kelly said that all of his meds were gone, but his cell phone and keys were at the house. The report states, I asked her again if she had any idea where Cameron may have gone. She said no and got upset again and started yelling at me.

The report goes on to say that Kelly called back later that evening and said that she was going out to look for Cameron all night, and if something happened to her, oh well. The officer advised her that was not the thing to do, and she might want to stay home and take care of her baby. Kelly proceeded to hang up on him. When we spoke with Kelly, she told us her version of the events that occurred around the time that Cameron went missing. She said that she did speak with Cameron on Saturday.

The dates believed he disappeared. I told Cameron I was going to Pineview. The last time I spoke to Cameron was June 26, 2010 at 2 o'clock. It was a Saturday. This is how well I remember this day. Cameron, I call. I'm like, hey, and Cameron literally told me this is the last conversation me and Cameron had.

um, honey, we got to get rid of our trailer that we live in. We're not allowed to have this much trailers on the property says, I guess there's a law or something like that. He literally is like, honey, do your treatment. I got this sweetie.

Sunday comes around and I call and my great grandma's like, well, he must've went to work. Cameron was a workaholic. Monday comes around. I get released from that treatment center expecting Cameron to pick me up.

I get released and I got to the car and it's my great grandma driving. I'm like, where the fuck is Cameron? She's like, Kelly, sit down. I need to talk to you. So I get in the car, I sit down. She's like, Kelly, don't freak out. But Cameron's been missing since Saturday. He didn't come home.

Kelly is blunt and doesn't mince words. Her memory is that when she spoke to her great-grandmother on Sunday, Louise said that Cameron must be working. But we know Louise also phoned police that day to report Cameron missing, though they told her she'd have to wait 24 hours. Perhaps Louise didn't want to cause panic and alarm while Kelly was at the treatment center, and that's why she didn't tell her until she picked her up. It was now Monday, and Kelly was learning that Cameron and their dog had vanished.

She said she rushed home to look for any clues as to where he may have gone and why.

I can tell you right now, if Cameron would have just upped and left me, he would have taken clothes, his wallet, his phone, his IDs. When I came back from this treatment center, when I walked into my trailer, it looked like Cameron was interrupted. I know Cameron. I was with that man four and a half years. I knew him like the back of my hand, okay?

Something was off. What kind of man goes missing with just the clothes on his back? Then about two days later, I go out. Two stories long, having my great-grandma and grandpa lived and had this big, beautiful, huge dining room window.

Zero's running, trying to get into our, we had an acre with a six foot chain link fence surrounding the acre. So, you know, they had gardens, so animals couldn't get in and out. So we had a fence. Zero's trying to get into the fence and he came back. I thought I lost Zero forever. Zero came back, no caller. What happened to his call? Zero always had a caller.

In an attempt to locate Cameron, investigators called around to various hospitals in the area to see if he had been admitted there. Perhaps there had been an accident or some other logical explanation for Cameron's absence, but they didn't find him there. The next morning, something strange and unexpected occurred. Earlier, you heard mention of a man named Ryan, who lived in another trailer on the property where Cameron resided.

Ryan was in a relationship with Kelly's sister Casey, and around 7.30 a.m. on the 29th, a call came in about Ryan taking off with the four-month-old son he had with Casey. CPS also called into the sheriff's office and said they were en route. The fire department phoned in too, because Casey went there seeking help to get her baby back. This was a lot to be going on all at once. First, Cameron disappeared, and now there was a baby missing too. Also on the 29th, search

Search and Rescue came out and searched the subdivision for Cameron, but they didn't turn up any clues. On the 30th, they searched the area from the air, and four teams of residents from Forest Lakes went out searching the roads and forested areas for Cameron.

On the 1st, they located Ryan's quad on Lot 453 in Forest Lakes, and someone called in a tip about Ryan having a large dumpster at a job site on Lot 428. Since this occurred within a subdivision, the areas are often referred to as lots instead of addresses.

Doreen said that there was construction going on on some of these lots, and others were still undeveloped. Someone else phoned the sheriff's department and reported seeing Ryan putting stuff in that dumpster the week prior, but they couldn't recall the exact details.

Follow-up on that dumpster revealed that it had been picked up on the 30th. There were various community members coming forward claiming to have seen Ryan around. One person said they saw Ryan jogging down the road. There was another sighting of him at a local library, local stores, and so on. There was one woman who claimed that she thought she saw Cameron at a library on Monday, June 28th.

She said she was certain about that date because there was an AA meeting at the library while she was there. She went back to the library and confirmed that the AA meeting was held there on Monday the 28th. She described the person she thought was Cameron as creepy, and he made her feel uneasy. That sighting remains unconfirmed, and beyond that, no one else ever reported seeing Cameron.

Law enforcement located Ryan's truck south of Yonge, Arizona, where it had been broken down along Highway 288 around milepost 284 in neighboring Gila County.

Reports note that an officer who was assigned to the Marijuana Eradication Task Force observed the vehicle in the area of a known marijuana garden and decided to run the plates. After it was recovered, they were able to obtain a search warrant for the truck on the 2nd. Notes regarding the search of the truck said that nothing of evidentiary value was found. Doreen explained what she knows of the search efforts of Ryan's truck and trailer.

They started with Ryan's trailer. Now, I wasn't there, but what I was told by Kelly and Casey, actually, Casey is Kelly's sister, the one that was married to Ryan, but she's a little more down to earth. Some things I can trust from her, but apparently they got a warrant, a search warrant. They had a crime scene. They taped off the trailer of Ryan's trailer. They went in there, and by this time, Ryan had fled.

with his baby already. So they got a warrant and went ahead and made entry. He had a padlock on his trailer, but they broke through that. Went in, they confiscated his computer. They had paper bags marked evidence with certain items in there.

On the 7th, investigators spoke to someone who said that Kelly and her mother, Jessie, had asked a man to help them load plastic bags into their vehicle. When asked what was inside the bags, they said old food from a freezer. As he was helping, a bag ripped and he described a substance that leaked out as gooey stuff. The whole thing made him uncomfortable with Cameron being missing.

A community member reported that Kelly had told him that she knows in her heart that Ryan killed Cameron and that no one would help her do anything about it. She also allegedly said to this person that she hit the CPS lady in the mouth the other day when she came over. In a supplemental report dated July 13, 2010, it's noted that there was a verbal altercation between Cameron and Ryan, but that Ryan was apparently in the home with Kelly's great-grandmother when Cameron disappeared.

A theory began to develop regarding Ryan taking off with his infant son, that perhaps he may have done that because of some criminal act involving Ryan and Cameron, though there was no hard evidence to support that theory. Further reports explain that the alleged reason Ryan took off with his infant son was that he had seen Casey smoking, quote, marijuana cigarettes while breastfeeding.

and he later contacted authorities in neighboring Navajo County to point out drug houses, because he was tired of seeing illegal substances ruin his life and other family members' lives. They later learned that Ryan had fled in the direction of Phoenix, where he planned to catch a flight to Tampa, Florida.

Despite the truck breaking down, Ryan made it to the airport and caught his flight in time. He stayed in Florida until July 2nd, then flew to Medford, Oregon. The report states that Ryan may have gone to Florida to visit his father, and his mother lived in Oregon. During that time frame, his grandmother wired Ryan some money to help him out. Ryan's travels raise suspicions that he could have been involved in Cameron's disappearance.

That's why they were able to obtain a warrant to search his truck, his residence, and the room Ryan said he stayed in with Casey inside her great-grandmother's house on the night that Cameron vanished. But unfortunately, those searches didn't turn up anything.

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Coconino County is the largest county in the state, encompassing nearly 19,000 square miles of land. It's vast but also sparsely populated, and much of the terrain is rugged and mountainous. This can present challenges when searching for a missing person, but also in terms of the area that the Sheriff's Department has to cover in their day-to-day patrols. Doreen said that they would sometimes get pulled off to respond to emergencies hours away.

And that did affect their ability to respond to developments in Cameron's case quickly. Coconino County, two hours away in Flagstaff is the police department. They're very limited up there and they have acres. I mean, they have so much property and Coconino County is a huge county and their sheriff's department are the only cops up there. So everything from disappearances of the Grand Canyon to you name it and fire.

I knew that because we lived up there before we moved to Oregon. So I knew that we wouldn't get a whole lot of cooperation, I guess you could say, from them quickly. And I think that's what it needed. I really think that if something had been done sooner...

But of course, I know we all say that, right? If something would have been done sooner. But there was an incident up in Flagstaff, an officer-involved shooting. So Cameron's case was put on the back burner almost immediately within that same week. Detective Deloria said, I'm sorry, but right now I got to handle this stuff going on, this officer-involved shooting. So we'll get back on Cam's case. Right there and then, I knew precious time was already being wasted.

There was nothing I could do about it. They got the helicopters up. I was told they couldn't fly long because they had no funds for gas. First, they had to drop camp case because there was a priority on

an officer, which I understand. They're family. But first you got to do that. And then now we don't have money to do that. They searched the local dump. They got the fire department and their SAR team out there because Ryan was a contractor and there was a garbage can, a big garbage bin. And they knew that he was dumping garbage there at the dump. They searched the dump. They did an okay job. I didn't even know how extensive the search really was.

Until years later. And then I also got on the phone and I got a hold of a search team that came up with their 18-wheeler and their dogs. They had cadaver dogs and all kinds of dogs. And they searched the ponds.

After learning that their son was actually missing, and he had disappeared sometime after Kelly had made that panic call to them, Doreen and Frank traveled to Arizona. They began asking questions of those who had been living on the property with Cameron, and they immediately began to notice that things weren't adding up.

Well, we went up there to start looking for him ourselves and talk with people and all that stuff. Kelly, as soon as I got there, handed me over some of his things and said, here, you might want to hold on to this ring, this necklace, and the wedding ring that he had that they never were married. But he had a ring that they gave each other. She gave me that and she was handing over his stuff very quickly. The only thing that was missing, according to her, was his wallet.

But yet when we went up there, she goes, oh, I'm going to go take the food stamp card and go get some food. And I said, Kelly, Kim's wallet's gone. And she goes, I know, but I have the food stamp card. And I said, why?

Because Cameron would not let her have the food stamp card because she was buying food, selling it to buy drugs. So he had to babysit the food stamp card. She never had that card. If his wallet was gone, then why in the hell does she have access to that card?

Doesn't make sense. He wouldn't have taken any keys. He would have left. His door was never locked up there. They never locked any of the doors up there. He didn't have a vehicle at the time, so he would have had to walk off someplace. But yeah, and then Kelly did make a statement that his blue backpack was gone, but his medications were gone.

Well, when I went up there, I was a nervous wreck. And Kelly says, oh, I've got Cameron's medicines here. Do you want to value him? She reached in to a hutch where the grandmother keeps all of her dishes, reached in where there was about four to five pills.

Cameron's name was on those pills. Cameron did not take those pills. I think because Cameron had to hide his pills, she would take them and didn't want anybody to know she had taken them. So it makes perfect sense that she would tell the police that they were gone. And then I saw him with my own eyes. She said that when he left, he took a blue pack with him. But then later she said she found the blue pack.

When we got there, she actually excused herself. We stayed with Louise, her great-grandmother that raised her, because she had an appointment, she said, in Snowflake. Well, the detective actually told me that the appointment that she kept when we got there in Snowflake was with one of her boyfriends that she had. And as she stood there and was giving me stuff of Cameron's, then when she was on her way, I

I thought it was just a regular doctor's appointment or something, but it turned out it was, I guess maybe the detectives were even actually kind of following her because they knew

On the topic of Cameron's medication, police reports state that in the early stages of the investigation, it was indicated that Cameron took all of his medications with him, and a consent search of his trailer resulted in negative results in looking for any of his medications. However, Kelly later contacted the Coconino County Sheriff's Office to inform them that she did find Cameron's medications. When they asked her to hold on to them for the purpose of turning them over as possible evidence,

She indicated that she already destroyed them. Hearing some of this information might lead you to wonder if this whole thing was a setup. The last person to see Cameron was Kelly's relative, Louise, on Saturday the 26th. But did she really see Cameron? Frank and Doreen remember that Kelly had called them in a panic the day prior, that Friday night. Doreen said that at first, she wondered about that too. Was it true that Cameron had disappeared on Saturday? Or could he have gone missing on Friday or

or sometime before that? I thought, okay, so something happened to Cameron. She got scared and chucked herself into rehab. It couldn't have been that something happened to Cameron before that Saturday. He'd made a phone call to my...

stepmother, Dolores, who lives in California. So he made a phone call. So we know that he was okay Saturday afternoon. The police checked her alibi and it panned out. She didn't get out of the rehab until eight o'clock that Monday morning. So eight o'clock that Monday morning, she supposedly was released from, it was called Pineview. And that's

That's when the dog was there, had come through the gate or whatever, because she called me when she got there and she goes, no, Cameron's not around. Zero's here. But I guess Louise had mentioned that the dog hadn't been seen. The next day when I called the main house looking for to see if my son would answer, a guy answers the phone and I said, may I speak with Cameron? Oh, he doesn't live here anymore. He hangs up. I called back. I asked Kelly, I said, who was that? She goes, oh, my new boyfriend. She had a guy move in two days after he was gone.

Doreen was told that Kelly's alibi checked out. When we spoke to Kelly, we asked her how long she was at Pineview, and she said a week. Louise said she saw Cameron on Saturday, and there was also that call to Doreen's stepmother. Plus, Kelly told us that she heard from him on Saturday afternoon around 2 p.m. Doreen said the recording of the message Cameron left for her stepmother was saved, but she was sad to learn that it has since been lost.

There was a recording, okay, and the police department had lost this recording, and I am so angry with them. Chuck Jones, he got the recording. My son called. He left a message on Dolores' answering machine. Dolores, hey, it's Cameron. You know, call me when you can. So we know for sure he was alive on Saturday because that was his voice. I heard the recording one time. Chuck Jones said he would save that for me because I said, Sabrina,

When she's old enough, it's going to want to know what her daddy's voice sounds like. And I really, really want a copy of this. And then I tried getting it and tried getting it. And they told me that they'd lost it. They couldn't find it. That was his voice talking to Dolores on that recorder. I never heard from him again after that. That was his last communication. So whatever happened to him had to happen after that Saturday.

Doreen said that she heard the voicemail that Cameron left for her stepmother, and what she can remember is that Cameron called her stepmother around 1 or 2 p.m. that Saturday. Dolores was at a birthday party and missed the call, so Cameron left a voicemail that said something along the lines of, Hey, I have to move my trailer out of here pretty soon, and I was wondering if I could talk to you about some help I need.

Doreen wishes that she could listen to that message again, but she said that when she did listen to it, she listened carefully. And from her memory, she said that Cameron didn't sound scared or distressed. This lines up with what Kelly mentioned earlier, that Cameron spoke to her on Saturday while she was in that treatment facility and said he had to move their trailer.

It sounds like perhaps they were in violation of a local ordinance, having multiple trailers on that property. Frank also recalls that Cameron had mentioned this to him as well, during one of their phone calls. He said that both he and Ryan would need to move their trailers soon. The more that Doreen learned about the circumstances regarding her son's disappearance, and the other events that occurred around the same time,

including Ryan taking off with his infant son. She began to narrow her focus on Ryan. She wanted to learn more about his relationship with Cameron.

We started tying things together when we realized that there was a strange relationship between Ryan and Cameron. Then we started finding out how he ended up kidnapping his own baby, driving the back streets from Forest Lakes to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix with a one-way ticket to Florida. This happened about three days after Cam disappeared. So after we started learning all this new information, everything started pointing at Ryan more.

I always have an open mind. And I knew that she was seeing a bunch of other guys. I know that these guys were all interviewed by the police department.

Doreen said that she maintains an open mind and knows there are a number of things that could have happened to her son. But she learned that a rift had developed between Cameron and Ryan prior to her son's disappearance. And just a brief disclaimer here. The following clip includes discussion of animal abuse that resulted in death. It may be distressing for some of our listeners. Please take care and consider skipping this section if you find such topics triggering.

Ryan got him a job doing a roof and some construction on a cabin. It was like a $2,000 job. And this is from what I've been told by the people up there that Ryan promised him $1,500 when he finished the job. Ryan didn't work on this job. Ryan was going to keep $500 for his pocket because he had other jobs that he was doing. But if Cameron wanted to do it, he would give him $1,500 once he completed the job.

Once Cameron completed that job, Ryan gave him no money. Ryan said, no, I'm not paying you. That started the rift. They never really cared for each other much to begin with, but he was a very, very heavy meth user. Very heavy. In fact, you'll find in that police report of an incidence where he grabbed the puppy and shot and killed the puppy right in front of his own family. And in hearing the report that's written when

the cops did a interview with Casey on how he was screaming at her that he wanted the rent money so that he could buy some meth. And she wouldn't. She said, no, you're not getting the rent money. You're not getting rent money. And he went and grabbed the dog and in front of his children and her. Ryan was a person of interest. Definitely. I believe that everybody, the locals up there didn't know about the rift between Ryan and him. Cameron was the kind of kid. He never had an enemy in his life. Never.

But I think maybe with his short temper, the way that it had gotten, and it may have gotten even worse over the years, I don't know. But he needed the money for the baby. And knowing how much he loved Sabrina, I'm sure that him and Ryan, there had been an incident where a couple weeks, a month before this had happened, him and Ryan got into a heated debate. And

A rock was thrown through the trailer window of my son's. Ryan threw the rock and he and Ryan, I guess, I don't know, had something. But they took Cameron to jail and not Ryan. When I talked to the detective, he goes, well, I wasn't an arresting officer. But my guess is because Cameron probably didn't calm down. They took him just to separate them.

Kelly said that Cameron never liked Ryan. And it's her belief that Cameron didn't approve of the drug use going on at that time. But also, Kelly said that Ryan was always kind of a scary guy.

Cameron didn't like very many people. Actually, honestly, Cameron didn't like anybody. He didn't like my mom. He didn't like my sister. He didn't like Ryan. Ryan and Cameron always had beef because Ryan was a drug addict and Cameron wasn't. Ryan did meth and Cameron didn't like it. Ryan's a psychopath. I will say it to this day. He's a crazy motherfucker. Pardon my language. But yeah, he's crazy.

Ryan, you want a definition of a psychopath in the dictionary? You look it up, you'll see his picture. I'm not going to lie. I was terrified of him. Terrified. Ryan's never threatened me. He's never hurt me. It wasn't like that. It was, you know, when you get the feeling around somebody, right?

You just can feel it. You know how they say a gut feeling is not even a feeling in your gut. It's legit like a feeling in your heart when your heart pounds uncontrollably when you're around somebody and for no reason why you just get this fear.

I've known Ryan since I was 14 before I even got with Cameron. And this is nothing new. I always had that with him. This was not just new beef. Ryan and Cameron had beef with each other before me and my sister even started seeing either one of them. This was nothing new. And this is the weird thing. If you have nothing to hide, why are you taking off two days after Cameron goes missing? Casey, come on.

smoking pot and breastfeeding. That's not why he took off. That's a lie. He didn't just take a baby. He took a newborn baby. He had no reason to take that child away from my sister. The baby's three months old and she was breastfeeding. What kind of father does that if they're not running from something?

What's even more strange is that Kelly said that not only did their dog, Zero, disappear with Cameron, but so did Ryan and Casey's dog, Tipsy.

My sister's dog, Tipsy. How do my dog, Zero, my blue tick, LaQueen's healer, Tipsy, my sister's pit bull, and a man, my husband, basically, go missing in one day? Tipsy never came back. No. Zero did.

This was troubling to learn because you've already heard Doreen mention Ryan's disturbing history with another dog. What could this all mean? And this is where we're going to pick up Cameron's story next week.

Investigators did eventually catch up to Ryan, and you'll get to hear his explanation as to why he took off when he did. And you can decide for yourself if you believe he was being truthful or not. There's also much more ground to cover in this case, including a friend who claimed to have seen Cameron months after he vanished, and even said he went fishing with him, and later thought he had found Cameron in San Francisco.

Plus, another promising lead closer to home. A grisly discovery made by a hiker just a few years ago. Could that be Cameron? There's a lot to unpack in this case. If you have any information regarding the disappearance of Cameron Sequeira, please call the Coconino County Sheriff's Office at 928-774-4523 or 1-800-338-7888.

If you would like to remain anonymous, you can contact Silent Witness at 928-774-6111. Cameron? No, he wasn't perfect. I'm not going to lie to you and say, oh, he was amazing. Like, he wasn't perfect, but you know what? He wasn't bad either. He didn't deserve this. Do I believe he has something to do with it? My heart and my gut tell me, but do I have proof? No. I wish I did.

I really do. I try to keep close tabs. You know how they say, keep your friends close, enemies closer? That's exactly what I was doing. Then all of a sudden, he literally like vanished. I think he went in hiding. I really do.

Well, she gets a phone call on her phone and she goes outside to talk. And she comes back in and she goes, oh, I just talked with Eric. And Eric says him and Pam went fishing last weekend. And I went, what? Pam's been missing by this time probably a few months. And he goes, yeah, yeah, they went fishing together. Some guy in a white car dropped Cameron off at his house and they went to Lake Pleasant fishing.

Cameron kept approaching him. He said, "No, I'm not going to pay you." The roof was done. Cameron did his job and he didn't give him a penny. And from what I understand from Kelly again, he said that Cameron would always go and say,

We need the money for the baby. Sabrina was only two. And they lived. You could throw a stone. Cameron lived in one trailer. Brian lived in another on the same property as the main house. I think Cameron lost it. I'm sure Cameron got really upset. He worked hard on that roof.

That brings us to the end of episode 461. I'd like to thank everyone who spoke with us for this series. If you have a missing loved one that you'd like to have featured on the show, there's a case submission form at thevanishedpodcast.com. If you'd like to join in on the discussion, there's a page and discussion group on Facebook. You can also find us on Instagram. If you like our show, please give us a five-star rating and review. You can also support the show by contributing on Patreon, where you can get early and ad-free episodes.

Be sure to tune in next week for part two of Cameron's story. Thanks for listening. If you like The Vanished, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson here to talk...

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