Noah Sweet remembers getting in the car and feeling like he needed to drive away, to suppress his racing thoughts, but he doesn't remember exactly where he went the evening of Sept. 2. Those hours are a blur.
He was later told by his mother, Becky Southwell, that his credit card transactions showed him stopping at a KFC, then at a gas station for coffee. At one point, he made it to Grass Lake, a spot familiar to him and close to Southwell's home in southeast Michigan. Police officers determined Sweet had driven back-and-forth on I-94, using cell towers to track his phone, which he turned off.
Had it been on, it would have been ringing nonstop. Calls and texts from his family members, friends and numbers he didn't recognize, but Sweet wasn't checking his messages after posting an ominous tweet that read, "I'm doing everyone a favor. No one will miss me years from now."
"I got to a point where I just wanted to be gone," Sweet, 19, told The Observer. "I just wanted to disappear. Not necessarily attempt suicide, but I just wanted to remove myself away from everything."
The tweet quickly spread throughout the NASCAR community as Sweet's followers tried to track down someone who was in touch with the budding graphic designer known as "Lefty."
Southwell said she got a call from her niece as she was driving home that afternoon. She said her niece received a message through Facebook saying that Sweet posted an alarming tweet, and she informed Southwell. Realizing the implications, Southwell turned her car around and headed to her ex-husband's house half an hour away in Saline, where Sweet lives, but she thought it was too late.
It was a mother's worst nightmare.
"I thought he had committed suicide," Southwell said. "I can't tell you how dry my mouth was. I just couldn't get my car to go fast enough."
When she arrived, Sweet's father, Chad, had already returned home from work and was searching for their missing son. They called the police, and officers from the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office arrived to aid in the search efforts. Sweet was found a few hours later by Southwell's husband, Vern. Sweet was walking on the side of a road near their home in Grass Lake, unable to speak due to his almost paralyzing anxiety.
By then, Sweet said he had turned his phone back on to see a message from his 18-year-old brother, Gabe. That was the text that broke Sweet. Gabe has autism, and Sweet had been trying to be a role model but felt like he was "failing him" by putting everyone through such a scare. He braced himself to return home and apologize.
But Sweet hadn't turned his phone off to hide from his family, he explained. He just couldn't stand to look at it anymore.
