By Jefferson Weaver
There are very few yellow ribbons any more, at least for Buddy Myers.
On Oct. 5, 2000, Buddy and his Aunt Donna were in the living room of their home near Roseboro. Donna was tired – raising a four-year-old will tax anyone, much less a lady who thought her child-rearing days were over when her sister’s grandson needed a home.
Buddy – his real name is Tristen, but few remember that – was a typical little boy. He loved football, his dogs, and the neighbor’s horses. He loved NASCAR and his Uncle John’s 18-wheeler.
Like most little boys, he didn’t want to take a nap on that lovely autumn afternoon, when the hickories and oaks were just turning, and the air giving just a hint of the relief to come. Mosquitoes were still flying, and it was still hot, but there was promise in the air.
Donna made him come inside, though, and later she told me she figured he’d wear himself out in the living room, while she relaxed for a few minutes. She drifted off just after he went to sleep on the floor, but I sometimes wonder if she has slept since.
Buddy disappeared on that autumn afternoon; he has never been seen again.
He’d be 20 today. I’d like to think he might have joined the military, or gone to college. There’s no doubt he’d have learned to drive trucks by now, regardless of the law, since he loved the big rigs. There was a toy Kenworth under an aging Christmas tree the last time I was in Donna’s house, more than a decade ago. She’s never given up hope.
I’ve seen that hope, along with fear, in the eyes of other parents whose children vanished. I know a lot of teens and twenty-somethings would bow up at being called a child, but as my friend Monica Caison says, every missing person is somebody’s child. The tag we use on social media whenever a teenager runs away is “Somebody’s baby.” You’re always somebody’s baby, no matter how old you are.
Miss Rhonda and I were in bed, almost asleep, when my editor called and sent me to the search for Buddy Myers. Of all the things that stick out in my mind of those next few days, I always think of flashlights shining through the trees, into the sky, across the yard and fields, and people hollering “Bobby! Bobby!” In those first confusing minutes, a lot of folks had his name wrong.
I also remember the command post where we seemed to live for the next three days, and a brassy, loud, bossy woman holding a cell phone in one hand while she held Donna with the other. It’s funny that at first, I didn’t like the lady, but later, she came to be someone I love and admire, the aforementioned Monica Caison, with the CUE Center for Missing Persons. Hers is a friendship that I treasure, even though we rarely talk more than once or twice a year, unless somebody’s baby vanishes in my neck of the woods.
And there are so many missing babies.
We have a handful of families who are always in our family prayers – Alive Donovan, Michelle Bullard, Britanee Drexel, a Robinson fellow from our old home community—but there are so many more. Sometimes, the families have had a body to bury, and they can begin healing. There was a case like that just last week, where a teenage girl’s remains were found after several years. Sometimes, there are miraculous reunions – like when an elderly friend of ours was found frozen to the ground, and lived to tell about his adventure.
But for so many more, there’s just an empty chair or a waiting Christmas tree. Every car passing the driveway brings a brief ray of hope, a hope which fades a little more every time the vehicle passes on by.
There have been rays of hope any number of times at the Myers’ home – when a boy found in Chicago matched Buddy’s description, and I stood on our back porch in the rain, crying out to God that it might be true. Then there’s the reassurance that comes with other happy endings—when three women were rescued from a monster earlier this year, Donna and her family put up new ribbons in front of the house on Microwave Tower Road. She was still mourning the loss of her beloved John, but the hope that someone’s memory might be awakened when other people’s babies were found alive stirred her to beat the old drum again, making sure no one could forget the boy she called her own.
Humans need closure; we know, deep in our hearts and minds, that people don’t just disappear. They don’t vanish into thin air. They run away, or get lost, or are kidnapped, or just distance themselves from everyone else. They get snatched up in custody disputes. They don’t just disappear.
But a little kid few of us knew but many of us still love, a little kid named Buddy – well, he just disappeared.
There were traces, of course—tracks from his tennis shoes (which may have been a few days old). A favorite toy found in the woods. His dogs, clean and groomed, mysteriously returning on the Sunday after he vanished. There were rumors – strange cars, horrible speculations, TV-movie quality plot lines involving his biological dad, his troubled mother, someone on whim finding a little kid wandering lost and taking him in to raise as her own.
There were leads and gossip and psychics and bloodhounds and prayers and hopes, but there was no little boy named Buddy.
Little kids just don’t disappear, even in a place with dense woods and swamps and clay pits that have swallowed cars, and roads which quickly lead to anonymity and interstates.
But Buddy disappeared.
For days, we held on, but as a cold front moved in, bringing weather more suited for February than October, the search was called off. We stood and listened as Major John Hayes told the media and the searchers that it was over. A couple dozen volunteers from other states and communities stayed around for a few days afterward, and others came back, but no one has seen Buddy Myers since that autumn afternoon when the air was full of promise.
Miss Rhonda and I happened to stop in Roseboro a while back, at a store whose windows were once plastered with “Buddy posters.” I didn’t see one for Buddy, but there was another similarly desperate poster, this time for a pretty teenaged girl.
I don’t recall her name, but I know she is somebody’s baby.
The yellow ribbons are mostly gone now, except for the new ones tied by a family who have never given up hope, a family who still waits for the young man many came to love, but only a few knew, a little boy we still call Buddy.
Anyone with information about the disappearance of Tristen “Buddy” Myers is asked to call the Sampson County Sheriff’s Office at 910.592.4141.
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