Seeing them living once more

With recent cases, it’s pretty common to find the missing person’s social media accounts from prior to their disappearance and get to learn about them, their personality, their likes and dislikes. For older cases, pre social media, this is less common, but it still happens sometimes.

Today, out of nowhere, I decided to look up Monterrio Holder on the newspaper archives, simply because his name is unique enough that I thought I might find something. As it turns out, Monterrio was an athlete when he attended Washington High School in Indianapolis and college in Tennessee. He did play football, but his real talent was in track, specifically jumping.

He was one of Indiana’s top high jumpers in his time. He did a 6’8 high jump as a seventeen-year-old in 1988. In 1989, as a high school junior, he made an attempt at a city record in the high jump and, though he missed it, he did account for all 28 of his track team’s points in that competition. In March 1994, just months before his disappearance, he competed at the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championship and finished third in the high jump, 7’3. The Indianapolis Star had several photos of him at competitions, some of them mid-jump. I added three to his casefile.

Nothing about his disappearance, however. What happened to this young man?

MP of the week: Jonathan Hamby

This week’s featured missing person is Jonathan Alan Hamby, a 37-year-old man who disappeared from Mishawaka, Indiana on February 26, 2017. After some problems with substance abuse and run-ins with the law, he’d turned his life around, found religion and gotten a job. But then he stopped taking his depression/anxiety meds and his loved ones noticed he seemed to be struggling. And then he was gone, and his cherished car with him.

Usually when a person disappears with their car, and neither of them turn up, I tend to believe both the person and the car is in a body of water somewhere. I almost kind of hope that for Hamby, because the alternative — something that his parents believe — is that he was murdered.

If still alive, he’d be 41 years old now.