TX TX - Caleb Harris, 21, Texas A&M University student, Corpus Christi, 4 Mar 2024

[Fireflye]

Good question, and walk down to the bridge area.

It is, as this info now eliminates the theory he was out there waiting for the Uber driver, also this now points more towards a possible planned meet up with someone.

 

[OrangeCash]

It is, as this info now eliminates the theory he was out there waiting for the Uber driver, also this now points more towards a possible planned meet up with someone.

Does anyone have the apartment and drainage ditch/bridge pinned on a map? I'm trying to visualise it and can't seem to find it just by looking on google maps. I don't know which their apartment is etc

 

[Fireflye]

Also,

It is, as this info now eliminates the theory he was out there waiting for the Uber driver, also this now points more towards a possible planned meet up with someone.

or go back to the area to check out something he possibly saw on his walk

 

[vega80]

I know we're all focusing on the snap chat, since we're led to believe he was just using his phone for that at the time he went missing. He very well could have been texting or Facebook messaging, or whatsapp-ing, hence the last ping on his phone before it went radio silent. LE alludes to this morphing in to a technical investigation, reviewing devices, video, that sort of thing to put the pieces together.

 

[microsleuth88]

I am feeling very strongly in looking at this photo that it is a clue. There would be absolutely no reason for Caleb to take this random screenshot and send it for no reason. Typically, people snap photos of themselves. This photo is so random. He took it and sent it at 3:03 in the morning? Why? I feel strongly there is an answer here. Did he send it to someone quickly to provide a clue that he was being taken? Did he see or hear something that caused him to take the photo and send it?

That said, and I don't know if this is correct, but the screenshot of the snap may have been taken at 6:06 PM not 6:06 AM. FYI - I have college aged kids and the amount of snaps these kids send out and receive constantly is astounding. They also have something called streaks. In order to maintain their "streak" with a friend, they have to snap them every single day, or the streak ends and restarts. Could this have been just a simple streak shot he sent to maintain a streak?

That said, I feel very strongly this is the most important clue we have. The dog video is not a clue. It was way prior to him going missing. The Uber Eats person is a red herring. Just something he did every night from what I understand. It was his lunch for the following day.

Honestly, one of the most perplexing cases I've seen in a while. Healthy young man just vanishes into thin air.

In the timeline, which is given chronologically, it goes from the

2:44 Snapchat video sent to his sister, to the
3:03 Snapchat of the bridge to a San Antonio friend, to
“3:12 AM Harris’s cell phone last shared location data with the nearest cell phone tower.”

I note that it does not mention the 2:58AM phone turning off or running out of battery life.
Are we to disregard the earlier reports on this?

This article also doesn't mention the car seen leaving the apartment by the Uber driver as she was arriving. I wonder why?

 

[CamilleBSP]

Regarding #1, yes, that's correct. Putting it in airplane mode wouldn't stop it from being trackable because iPhones track you even if you're not connected to any networks (either by making contact with other people's iPhones via bluetooth, registering and mapping the wi-fi connections available around you or by just tracking you and later sending that data to the servers after you get connected again). It would be possible to determine if the phone was turned off or if the battery died by subpoenaing Apple. It can't be tracked while turned off. You would have only the last time it pinged before being turned off.

iPhone still tracking you, as per Apple’s own website:

“You can even find devices that are offline or powered off.
If your missing device can’t connect to the internet or has little to no battery life, the Find My app can still help you track it down using the Find My network — hundreds of millions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices around the world. Nearby devices securely send the location of your missing device to iCloud, then you can see where it is in the Find My app. It’s all anonymous and encrypted to protect everyone’s privacy.”

Here you have the law enforcement guidelines provided by Apple which talks about how to obtain the information they have and what exactly you can get from them.

The part about the battery I read somewhere that they track battery cycles to know if your battery is original and that it is logged to Apple’s servers, but I also remember faintly about my professor talking about it during the lecture I had about geofencing, but I’d have to go back and watch the whole thing again, but it’s way past my bedtime rn. I’m having a hard time articulating this to Google it and get a reliable source to put here because I’m sleep deprived.

That’s it. That’s what I have for quotes of scholarly materials on technical discussions for now.

 

[fred&edna]

If there was some sort of transaction (as I mentioned in a previous post)... I can't imagine some large sum of money being involved. I mean, we're not talking kilos here (at least not in my theory-scenario). Also, there wasn't any hope of forcing Caleb to make major withdrawals from his bank account as he didn't even has his wallet with him (no bank card, etc). If this is the case... why would someone "keep" or harm Caleb... it's not as if Caleb would have reported "a bad transaction" incident to LE. I'm really puzzled.

 

[CamilleBSP]

It's possible, but logic dictates that the phone would stop transmitting whenever it was turned off/battery died, so it'd have to be a delay on the server responsible for sending the message to whoever it was intended to. We can't guarantee there wasn't a momentarily service stability issue right when the message left the phone delaying its delivery.

But phone dead = no messages getting transmitted.

I don’t have the tools to identify a possible problem with Snapchat at the day and time Caleb went missing, but now that the phone being turned off by 2:58 AM is kinda dispelled by law enforcement, there wouldn’t need to be a disruption in the service, necessarily.

I don’t know for sure what the appropriate scholarly quote would be here. Will come back to it in the morning.

 

[CamilleBSP]

Snapchat. It's convenient because the messages get deleted, so it's somewhat hard to bust someone for dealing in the app.

Back in 2023 there was a lawsuit filed by parents of victims of drug overdose who claimed Snapchat’s business model gets in the way of them getting justice for their kiddos:

“The suit claims Snapchat’s features facilitate practices like drug sales by connecting dealers to young customers while promising safety from legal repercussions through anonymity. Chief among those designs is the promise that a message will disappear not only to fellow users, but also on the software’s back end, says Matthew Bergman, the lead attorney on the case. It prevents law enforcement officials from seeing the activity of a dealer even after they have been identified.
Other problematic features include notifying individuals when another person screenshots their post, the ability to geolocate fellow users and algorithms that suggest new connections based on demographics.”

 

[Muddy K]

Does anyone have the apartment and drainage ditch/bridge pinned on a map? I'm trying to visualise it and can't seem to find it just by looking on google maps. I don't know which their apartment is etc

@OrangeCash, this was posted upthread a couple of days ago, a screen grab from a podcast video. It helped me understand how close the apartments are to the drainage culvert bridge.

 

[OrangeCash]

If there was some sort of transaction (as I mentioned in a previous post)... I can't imagine some large sum of money being involved. I mean, we're not talking kilos here (at least not in my theory-scenario). Also, there wasn't any hope of forcing Caleb to make major withdrawals from his bank account as he didn't even has his wallet with him (no bank card, etc). If this is the case... why would someone "keep" or harm Caleb... it's not as if Caleb would have reported "a bad transaction" incident to LE. I'm really puzzled.

In this scenario I'm imagining a car, a driver, at least 1 other person in the car, and Caleb. Maybe he got in, expecting a quick transaction, saw or heard something from them that he wasn't supposed to, and they couldn't let him leave? The other person in the car could prevent him from running and the driver can drive off drawing minimal attention. If this is the case, I'm hopeful LE will find what they're looking for in all the digital evidence, phone data, CCTV etc. I'm also hopeful someone has a guilty conscience and tells what they know

MOO

 

[MassGuy]

In this scenario I'm imagining a car, a driver, at least 1 other person in the car, and Caleb. Maybe he got in, expecting a quick transaction, saw or heard something from them that he wasn't supposed to, and they couldn't let him leave? The other person in the car could prevent him from running and the driver can drive off drawing minimal attention. If this is the case, I'm hopeful LE will find what they're looking for in all the digital evidence, phone data, CCTV etc

MOO

I think if that was the case though, they'd have figured it out by now. They don't have access to his phone of course, but they would have subpoenaed all the accounts that they know he used, as well as his phone records. Yes, he could have used an app that would make that difficult to impossible, but I have another issue.

There's going to be very little traffic that time of night, and a camera somewhere should have caught something. Unless there isn't a vehicle to catch.

Nothing excludes foul play, but I've had this feeling from the beginning that there's a missing piece that people close to this investigation know, that we obviously don't. Something that would change how we look at this.

 

[OrangeCash]

I think if that was the case though, they'd have figured it out by now. They don't have access to his phone of course, but they would have subpoenaed all the accounts that they know he used, as well as his phone records. Yes, he could have used an app that would make that difficult to impossible, but I have another issue.

There's going to be very little traffic that time of night, and a camera somewhere should have caught something. Unless there isn't a vehicle to catch.

Nothing excludes foul play, but I've had this feeling from the beginning that there's a missing piece that people close to this investigation know, that we obviously don't. Something that would change how we look at this.

I agree, it does seem too simple and basic not to have been solved by now or at least a lot further down the track, given it's now 25 days since Caleb disappeared. Hmmm

 

[MassGuy]

I agree, it does seem too simple and basic not to have been solved by now or at least a lot further down the track, given it's now 25 days since Caleb disappeared. Hmmm

And the other side of that is just as crazy; 25 days and somehow a barefoot guy disappeared on his own (whether that be suicide, accident, or just took off). There should be some sort of trace there...

 

[OldCop]

Does anyone have the apartment and drainage ditch/bridge pinned on a map? I'm trying to visualise it and can't seem to find it just by looking on google maps. I don't know which their apartment is etc

 

[CamilleBSP]

I think if that was the case though, they'd have figured it out by now. They don't have access to his phone of course, but they would have subpoenaed all the accounts that they know he used, as well as his phone records. Yes, he could have used an app that would make that difficult to impossible, but I have another issue.

There's going to be very little traffic that time of night, and a camera somewhere should have caught something. Unless there isn't a vehicle to catch.

Nothing excludes foul play, but I've had this feeling from the beginning that there's a missing piece that people close to this investigation know, that we obviously don't. Something that would change how we look at this.

There’s something to catch in all CCTV.

If they’re having trouble finding him across the footage, it’s only logical to think he left somehow concealed, probably inside a vehicle, willingly or not, *if* he ever left. MOO

Edit to add that when they talk about his phone’s last location it could also mean he was not necessarily in possession of his phone at the time.

Why they wouldn’t say to us if he was seen on camera going this or that way? That’s a really good question.

 

[MassGuy]

There’s something to catch in all CCTV.

If they’re having trouble finding him across the footage, it’s only logical to think he left somehow concealed, probably inside a vehicle, willingly or not, *if* he ever left. MOO

Yeah but there should be a vehicle to track down in the first place; something caught on video somewhere.

That’s why I’m troubled with the vehicle theory.

 

[IDK]

DBM.

 

[IDK]

Does anyone know what Caleb was majoring in? I haven’t seen it mentioned (though I haven’t read all the articles) Just trying to understand the situation a little better and whether his major was a high stress course of study.

My apologies if this has already been posted. I know his Dad said Caleb is doing fine in school with good grades and didn’t seem concerned about that aspect.

 

[acutename]

I am feeling very strongly in looking at this photo that it is a clue. There would be absolutely no reason for Caleb to take this random screenshot and send it for no reason. Typically, people snap photos of themselves. This photo is so random. He took it and sent it at 3:03 in the morning? Why? I feel strongly there is an answer here. Did he send it to someone quickly to provide a clue that he was being taken? Did he see or hear something that caused him to take the photo and send it?

That said, and I don't know if this is correct, but the screenshot of the snap may have been taken at 6:06 PM not 6:06 AM. FYI - I have college aged kids and the amount of snaps these kids send out and receive constantly is astounding. They also have something called streaks. In order to maintain their "streak" with a friend, they have to snap them every single day, or the streak ends and restarts. Could this have been just a simple streak shot he sent to maintain a streak?

That said, I feel very strongly this is the most important clue we have. The dog video is not a clue. It was way prior to him going missing. The Uber Eats person is a red herring. Just something he did every night from what I understand. It was his lunch for the following day.

Honestly, one of the most perplexing cases I've seen in a while. Healthy young man just vanishes into thin air.

how can there be "streaks" if the snaps disappear? there is a persisent record of "sents" even after the snaps are gone?