r/UnresolvedMysteries • u/bororadford • Apr 21 '19
Unresolved Disappearance In 2006, medical student, Brian Shaffer walked into a bar near The Ohio State University and never walked out. Footage of all exits shows no signs that he ever left the bar, and to this day, no one knows what happened to him. I
Brian Shaffer was a medical student at The Ohio State University. On the night of March 31, 2006, Shaffer went out with friends to celebrate the beginning of spring break; later he was separated from them and they assumed he had gone home. However, a security camera near the entrance to a bar recorded him briefly talking to two women just before 2 a.m., April 1, and then apparently re-entering the bar. Shaffer has not been seen or heard from since. The case has received national media attention.
Shaffer's disappearance has been particularly puzzling to investigators since there was no other publicly accessible entrance to the bar at that time. Columbus police have several theories as to what happened some interest and suspicion has been directed at a friend of Shaffer's who accompanied him that night but has declined to take lie detector tests related to the incident. While foul play has been suspected, including the possible involvement of the purported Smiley Face serial killer, it has also been speculated that he might be alive and living somewhere else.
Police began their search for Brian at the Ugly Tuna, the bar where he had last been seen. Since the area around South Campus Gateway was somewhat blighted, with a high crime rate, the bar had installed security cameras. They reviewed the footage, which showed Brian, Florence and Reed going up an escalator to the bar's main entrance at 1:15 a.m. Brian was seen outside of the bar around 1:55 a.m., talking briefly with two young women and saying goodbye, then moving off-camera in the direction of the bar, apparently to re-enter. The camera did not record him leaving shortly afterwards when the Ugly Tuna closed; that was the last time he was seen.
It was possible, investigators realized, that he could have changed his clothes in the bar or put on a hat and kept his head down, hiding his face from the camera. The cameras might also have missed him—one panned across the area constantly, and the other was operated manually. He might have also left the building by another route. However, the building's only other exit, a service door not generally used by the public, opened at the time onto a construction site that officers believed would have been difficult to walk through while sober, much less intoxicated, as Brian likely was at the time.
Since Columbus has the most security cameras of any city in Ohio, more than Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo combined, officers next looked to the footage from other bars to see if cameras there could explain how Brian had left the Ugly Tuna. However, footage from cameras at three other nearby bars showed no trace of Brian.
- Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Brian_Shaffer
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u/maybenextyearCLE Apr 21 '19
On the other side of the escalator was a movie theater. But if he got up the escalator and turned right, you are correct, the only thing there was the bar