Vincent Lamouris was 18 years old and lived with his mother in Ghent, in the Flemish north of Belgium. A few years earlier, at 16, he had jumped from a six-story building and survived; he spent six months in hospital and a year in a wheelchair, and was left with metal plates in his right leg and foot. By the beginning of 2002 his family believed he had recovered, physically and otherwise.
What happened
On the morning of Friday January 25, 2002 he told his mother he was going to school and would work a shift at a pizza restaurant that evening. He did neither. Belgian police later pieced together that he had applied for a passport without telling anyone, wiped the hard drive of his computer, and taken a train to the airport, where he boarded a flight to New York. According to the Charley Project, which maintains the most detailed English-language account of the case, he had booked a return flight for February 9; whether he ever meant to use it is not known.
Border records show that his passport was used the same day to cross from the United States into Canada at Niagara Falls, and again on January 31 to come back into the United States. Those are the last confirmed traces of him.
On February 2, the day after a heavy ice storm, his backpack was found at about 4:15 in the afternoon in a trash can in Prospect Park, the section of Niagara Falls State Park that runs along the top of the American Falls on the New York side. Inside were his passport, the return ticket, ten US dollars and about 25 Canadian dollars in coins, a pocket knife, taxi receipts, a CD player with 36 classical music discs, and a hardback copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Nothing else belonging to him has ever been recovered.
The investigation
The New York State Park Police, who police the falls, took the case; it is also carried by the New York State Police and listed with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which has published an age-progressed image showing how he might look at 39. In Belgium the federal police keep him on their register of citizens who disappeared abroad, and a 2020 round-up in La Dernière Heure put his case alongside a dozen other Belgians who vanished on foreign trips and were never found.
Investigators have very little to work with. There is no witness to him at the falls, no CCTV sighting that has been made public, and no record of where he stayed during his week on the Canadian side. The bag was found two days after his re-entry into the United States, which leaves a gap of at least a day that nobody can account for. Some agencies list him under a second surname, Colpaert.
The explanations
The obvious reading is the one his family feared. Niagara Falls is one of the best-known suicide sites in North America, he had made an attempt before, and the bag was left a few steps from the water with everything in it that a traveler would need to go anywhere else. Against that, the river gives up most of the people it takes, usually within days or weeks downstream, and in more than twenty years no remains matching his description have been found or identified.
The other reading is the one his mother has said she hopes for: that he walked away. The bin stood near a bus stop where tickets are sold without identification, and a young man with no passport and almost no money could still have disappeared into the United States or Canada in 2002, when border checks were looser than they became later that decade. There is no evidence for this beyond the absence of a body, and no sighting has ever been confirmed.
Where it stands
The case remains open but inactive. Lamouris is described as 6 feet 1 inch and about 160 pounds at the time, with light brown hair and blue eyes, and was thought to be wearing a black zip-up winter coat, a black wool sweater, black leather shoes and a Rodania wristwatch. Anyone with information is asked to contact the New York State Park Police at Niagara Falls.