After everything that happened during the search, one question remained that could never be answered with certainty: What happened to Reggie after he drove away from our parents’ house?

Over the years, our family has tried to piece together what may have happened from what we knew about Reggie that night, the condition in which he left, where his car was found and what was eventually discovered around Bull Creek.

Why We Believe Reggie Went to Bull Creek

When Reggie left the house, he believed that arrangements were being made to take him back into treatment. He had been through treatment and withdrawal before, and we believe he was extremely frightened of having to go through that suffering again.

We also knew that he was under the influence of drugs when he left.

Our belief is that Reggie did not necessarily drive to Bull Creek intending to die. He may simply have been looking for somewhere isolated where he could get away from everyone and feel safe. Perhaps to stay overnight, and return the following morning after the drugs had worn off and he had slept,

There was another detail that suggests he did not want to be found. Reggie knew that a cellphone could be used to determine someone’s location, and he had removed the battery from his phone.

We cannot know exactly what he was thinking when he did that, but it was consistent with someone who did not want people to know where he was.

What May Have Happened at the Car

The driver’s window was found open despite the cold weather. At the time, this puzzled my father because Reggie hated being cold.

There are several possible explanations.

Reggie may have been sitting in the car with the heater running and simply opened the window because the car had become too warm. It is also possible that hypothermia had already begun to affect his judgment and perception of temperature.

We simply don’t know.

At some point, however, the car battery went dead. My brother later confirmed that the battery was dead when the car was found.

Our family has wondered whether Reggie fell asleep in the car and woke sometime later to find himself extremely cold and unable to start it.

If that happened, what had begun as an attempt to hide away for a while would suddenly have become a dangerous situation.

Trying to Reach Help

We believe Reggie may then have tried to walk out toward the North Side Road. There was a farmhouse in that direction where he might have been able to find shelter and warmth.

By then, however, he may already have been suffering from hypothermia.

His clothing and other belongings found away from the car tell us that he had left the vehicle and moved through the surrounding area, but they cannot tell us exactly where he was trying to go or what he was thinking.

Our belief is that at some point he simply became too cold to continue.

The subsequent disturbance and scattering of his remains by wildlife means that their eventual locations cannot tell us precisely where Reggie died.

We will probably never know his exact final movements.

Finally Bringing Reggie Home

For almost seven months, our family had lived without knowing where Reggie was or what had happened to him.

Finding his remains was devastating, but there was also relief.

We could finally bring Reggie home. We could have a funeral. We could create a memorial site where his family and friends could go to remember him. The terrible uncertainty that had hung over the family since December was finally over.

Closure did not mean that everyone simply moved on.

My father seemed to carry the loss remarkably steadily over the years. He did not return to drinking to try to escape his grief.

For my mother, it was different. Losing Reggie affected her deeply, and in many ways she was never quite the same afterward. The effects of his disappearance, the months of searching and finally learning that he was gone stayed with her for many years.

Finding Reggie gave us an answer to the question that had consumed our family for almost seven months—where is he?

It did not erase what had happened.

But it allowed us to bury my brother, give him a memorial, and finally begin grieving for someone we now knew was not coming home.

What We Know—and What We Don’t

We cannot establish exactly what happened during Reggie’s final hours, and I don’t want to turn our family’s reconstruction into something more certain than it is.

We know that Reggie drove away from home while facing the prospect of returning to treatment. We know that he was intoxicated. We know that his car ended up at Bull Creek and that he had removed the battery from his cellphone. We know the car battery was later found dead. We know that clothing and, eventually, Reggie’s remains were recovered from the surrounding area.

Everything between those facts has to remain, at least partly, unknown.

But after everything we learned during and after the search, our family came to believe that Reggie may have gone to Bull Creek looking for somewhere to hide rather than somewhere to die—and that the cold may ultimately have turned that decision into something he never intended.