They became off-and-on roommates for the next five years. In the school’s computer lab, he came to know a man named Randall Godso. His sister wrote back, “My family has no comment.”Īfter graduating from high school, Rodriguez enrolled at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I wrote to his parents and sister in early January, two weeks after they heard the news. “He would not talk about his parents except to say ‘fuck them,’” Marie recalls. Marie, who lived with him as a friend for several years in his twenties, says he was angry that his parents had institutionalized him after the near suicide. Later, he would tell friends that he wanted to be buried in that field.Īt 17, with the consent of his parents, Rodriguez was emancipated by a Lafayette, Louisiana, court. The surgeries that followed were the cause of the scar that had so intrigued the Facebook group. He raised his hand weakly and a passing truck saw him and pulled over. But then, as he lay bleeding to death, he decided to live. When he was about 15, according to friends, Rodriguez headed off into a field with a gun, intending to kill himself. He told friends over the years that his father had deeply hurt him, but no one I spoke with seems to be clear exactly how. He had a twin sister and an older brother. Vance John Rodriguez, a k a Vaejor, was born in February 1976 near Baton Rouge. If he had been trying to escape something, it was himself. But the man whose journey had ended in the yellow tent wasn’t who anyone thought or hoped. We'd all been telling ourselves stories about his life. The handwriting was familiar, and the coding style too. Marie recognized the face and she knew all about the scar. The sheriff’s office had received hundreds of bad tips. This friend, who asked to be referred to by her middle name, Marie, told the detective that she knew who the hiker was. In the middle of December, photographs of Mostly Harmless found their way to a group of friends in Baton Rouge, one of whom called the Collier County Sheriff’s Office. I bought Facebook ads on my personal page to promote my story in the region of Louisiana where I thought his relatives likely lived. The founder of the company, David Mittelman, went on Facebook to talk about the case. They learned that the hiker had Cajun roots that his family had come from Assumption Parish, Louisiana and that there were family members with the name Rodriguez. Collier County had sent them a bone fragment they had extracted the hiker’s DNA and then begun searching for genetic similarities among people in a database called GEDmatch to build a tree of potential relatives. A genomics company, Othram, had taken his DNA and started to do cutting-edge genetic analysis to identify him. Meanwhile, a woman named Sahar Bigdeli had arranged for one of the country’s leading isotope analysts to study the hiker’s teeth in hopes that clues could be discovered about where he had lived. And so a group focused on digital forensics went through the accounts of every possible user who had been on Screeps up until April 2017, the date Mostly Harmless had given other hikers for when he’d begun his journey.
#Screeps reddit full#
On the trail, Mostly Harmless had carried a notebook full of ideas for Screeps, an online strategy game for programmers. Meanwhile, the dedicated Facebook hunters kept going. He had never been bowling in Newport News. The photos in my story didn’t look at all like her friend, who was indeed a hiker but who was alive and well in Los Angeles. She should take her time and call me back whenever, if she even wanted to. I told her that I was sorry to have broken such terrible news so suddenly. But I hadn’t focused on all the pain that could bring. I’d wanted to help identify the missing hiker. “Oh, no, Daryl,” she said as her voice quavered. I’d written about his story and posted it online. I contacted one of the friends and explained that a hiker had disappeared and that his name might have been Daryl McKenzie. McKenzie had just four Facebook friends and his only posts were photos of the wilderness. I told my editor, who got obsessed too, and she found a Facebook page for a Daryl McKenzie that hadn’t been active since 2017, the year Mostly Harmless started his trek. I began searching for details to validate the tale.
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