In 2008, 19-year-old Brandon Swanson was driving back home from an end-of-semester Spring party. While navigating the dark roads the teen drove his car into a ditch. While his parents made their way to where they thought he was, Swanson began walking home across the dark Minnesotan farmland, staying on the phone to his parents the whole time. Unfortunately, they would never find him.
Just before 2am was when Swanson’s parents received a phone call from him asking them to come and pick him up as he had crashed his car. What should have been a simple rescue quickly went south as the teen had lost his bearings after the crash, accidentally sending his parents in the wrong direction to where he really was.
Brandon told his parents he was somewhere between Lynd and Marshall. When his parents arrived on the road they flashed their lights, with Brandon doing the same, however, they could not see each other. Brandon honked his horn, but still nothing.
The teen thought he could see the lights of a nearby town across an abandoned farm and decided that he would make his way towards them. However, he was not where he thought he was.
Brandon’s final words to his parents
It was while he was walking across this abandoned field that thighs would go from bad to worse. By now, Brandon had been on the phone to his father for around 47 minutes, all of a sudden he yelled, “Oh sh–.” After that the call went dead and the young man seemingly dropped off of the face of the earth. His parents and friends spent the rest of the night searching for him and ringing his phone but they never saw, or spoke with, him again.
He was reported missing the next morning by his mother and authorities soon found his car between the towns of Taunton and Porter, 25 miles away from where he thought he was. Sniffer dogs followed his scent to the Yellow Medicine River but lost the scent around there.
What happened?
The disappearance of Brandon Swanson is still one of the most baffling to this day. While the obvious theory is that the teen fell into the river and drowned, none of his belongings were ever found, plus sniffer dogs did pick up his scent on the other side of the river, suggesting that if he did fall in, he got back out the other side.
Disturbingly, his scent was picked up on some farm equipment and at one point the scent of human remains was also detected as per kroc.com, however, police were forced to stop their search as the local farmers did not consent to their properties being searched.
So could Swanson have been the victim of foul play? It’s not out of the question. With it being 17 years since his disappearance we may never know the truth. Following his disappearance, Brandon’s law was passed which required law enforcement to begin searching immediately for adults under 21 and old adults who go missing under suspicious circumstances.
