A Newfoundland family is asking for the public’s help as the search for 29-year-old Brandon Tucker enters its second month.
Tucker was last seen at his home in Gander on July 8. He walked into the woods behind his house at 8 a.m., leaving his wallet behind. His phone received a ping from a cell tower just outside Gander that afternoon. Then silence.
No one has seen him since.
“This is a very isolated incident for Brandon,” Tucker’s sister-in-law, Caroline Matthews, said Thursday.
“He’s never left without a word to the family before, so that’s definitely new and shocking to everyone. It’s not something we expected.”
Matthews said Tucker’s family woke up every day with the nightmare of not knowing if Tucker was alive and in hiding, in trouble or dead. Her brother, she adds, struggles with basic tasks.
Even if Tucker just wanted to be left alone, she says, the family begs him — or anyone who may have seen him — to report he’s safe.
“If he, or someone who knows where he is, speaks out and lets us know he’s fine, he just doesn’t want to talk to us right now – it doesn’t matter. for us,” Matthews said. “We don’t care…we just want to know he’s okay.”
The family this week offered a $10,000 reward to anyone with information about Tucker’s whereabouts that would lead to his physical recovery: anyone who could have offered him shelter or retrieved him along the highway could help her, she said.
They only received one phone call, she said, which went nowhere.
“As a family, we are pleading at this point,” she said.
“We are desperate for any information. So if you think for a second that you saw him…it doesn’t matter if it was yesterday or two or three weeks ago….If you gave him a hot dog at a stand, that would be helpful.”
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