Brandon Lawson was 26, an oil-field worker and the father of four, living in San Angelo in West Texas with his partner of ten years. Late on the night of August 8, 2013, after an argument at home, he phoned his parents near Fort Worth, more than three hours away, and said he was driving up to see them. He left in his silver Ford F-150 a few minutes before midnight and headed north on US 277 through the empty ranch country of Coke County. He never arrived, and for more than eight years the only real trace of what happened next was a garbled emergency call.
What happened
At about 12:30 am on August 9 Lawson rang his brother Kyle to say the truck had run out of gas on the highway a few miles south of the small town of Bronte. Kyle later said Brandon told him people were chasing him out of town; asked whether he was hallucinating, Brandon said he was not. Kyle collected a gas can and set out with his wife and young son. At about 12:50 Brandon dialed 911. The call was answered at a nursing home in Robert Lee, where a nurse took it. The line was poor and much of what he said was hard to follow. He said his truck was out of gas, that he was in a field, that someone or something had gone into the woods, that he was not alone, and that he needed police to hurry. The recording later circulated widely online, and listeners have argued over its words ever since.
Minutes afterward a trucker called in a pickup parked partly across the road. A Coke County deputy reached it shortly after 1 am and found it empty. Kyle arrived at about the same time and was on the phone with his brother, who, by Kyle’s account, sounded out of breath, said he was bleeding, and insisted he could see Kyle and was right there. Neither Kyle nor the deputy could see anyone in the dark scrub. From 1:19 am every call to Brandon’s phone went to voicemail.
Kyle knew his brother had an outstanding drug-related warrant in another county, and he wondered whether Brandon was hiding from the deputy. He moved his car up the road, waited 30 to 45 minutes, and left the fuel in the truck bed. When he came back at about 5 am, nothing had been touched. The county towed the pickup a few hours later.
The search
Deputies searched the brush along the highway in the following days without finding a body; a report noted a spot under a tree near the road where someone appeared to have been sitting. By August 12 local police had concluded he was probably no longer in the county, and the next day, when his partner filed a missing person report, a Texas Rangers helicopter flew the area and saw nothing. The family’s Facebook group grew to tens of thousands of followers. The Rangers listed the case among their cold cases, with a Crime Stoppers reward on offer.
The explanations
The 911 call left room for every reading. Reports at the time said he had recently relapsed into drug use after months clean, and his brother later said he believed Brandon had taken methamphetamine that night; that would fit a frightened man seeing pursuers who were not there, then running from a patrol car because of the warrant and getting lost or hurt in rough country. Many people who have listened to the recording hear a genuine pursuit instead, and suspect foul play on a lonely road. His partner never believed he would have abandoned his children. No evidence of another person at the scene was ever produced.
Where it stands
In February 2022 a volunteer team of about ten searchers led by the missing-persons advocate Jason Watts found shoes and shorts matching what Lawson had been wearing, within a mile of where the truck had stopped. Texas Rangers widened the search and recovered human remains, including part of a skull. Identification took almost three years: on December 25, 2024, his family announced that DNA compared with his father’s had confirmed the remains were Brandon’s, and they were released to the family on July 18, 2025, to be cremated and shared between his parents and his children. No cause of death has been given. The Rangers’ file still describes the circumstances of his disappearance as under investigation, so the finding answers where he went but not why he ran.