Featured Image Credit: NCMEC
Topics: Cars, News, US News, True crime
Shola Lee
The strange disappearance of a 19-year-old boy prompted US state officials to make a new law.
On Tuesday, 13 May, 2008 as the Minnesota evening drew past midnight, Brandon Swanson had been driving back from an evening out with friends.
Suddenly, as he drove down Highway 68, his car became stuck in a ditch — Brandon called his parents, Brian and Annette, at 1:15 am telling them he was somewhere near Lynd and needed picking up. When, out of nowhere, the young lad yelled: 'Oh, s***'.
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Brandon was a student in his first year at Minnesota West Community and Technical College, so he knew the surrounding area well.
When his car got stuck, he devised a plan to meet his parents at the side of the road; they'd flash their lights, he'd flash his, and things should've been right as rain.
Except Brandon's parents couldn't see him, they stayed on the phone with their son for around 47 minutes, as they searched.
At one point, Brandon decided that he was going to head towards what he thought were the Lynd town lights.
He continued to talk to his parents until they heard him shout 'oh s***'. It was the last time they ever heard their son's voice.
The concerned parents continued searching for their son, and after being unable to find him at 6:30am, they went to the police to report him missing.
Police said it wasn't uncommon for young men to drop off the grid and to wait a while, in case he turned up.
However, when phone records showed that Brandon was actually near Porter, not Lynd, his parents worried.
A search started for the lad at 12:30pm, and his car was found off the side of a field, north of Taunton.
There was no damage to the car or signs that Brandon was injured.
However, the boy's body was never found, sniffer dogs were used to try and track his path but no remains were located.
To this day, it is still unclear what happened to Brandon, some theories suggest that he fell into a body of water as he walked onwards, or that he died of hypothermia.
This has not been confirmed and Yellow Medicine County Sheriff Bill Flared said that the vast area near where Brandon's car got stuck made things harder: "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 travelled?"
However, the mystery of the case led to his parents, creating Brandon's Law, which was sponsored by House Minority Leader Marty Seifert.
The law required officers to take a missing person's report without delay after being notified of a missing person.
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