Jan Hogan remembers a moment from more than 20 years ago, when her son was in the hospital. The accident had been horrible: the car had plowed through a telephone pole, and Bryan — her sweet, strong-willed 18-year-old — was thrown through the windshield.
The nurses put him on a morphine drip, and as he lay there, after it finished, he kept pushing the button for more, like it was a tic. “It’s all done, Bry,” Jan told him. “It’s out.”
He just found the motion comforting, he told her. Even back then, it made her uneasy.
It’s now been more than four years since Jan and her husband, Chris, last saw their son. He was standing there glassy-eyed in their rearview mirror as they pulled out of a parking lot near a methadone clinic in Brockton. Jan still hates thinking about the look in his eyes. “There was no there there.”
And the previous few months had been so good: Bryan was sober and happy and helping around the house in Wareham. He went kayaking with his sister. They went to a family wedding. He had a job at the package store down the street.
Then they caught him using again. Jan had walked into his room just after midnight to find him hanging half off the bed, crack paraphernalia scattered around him. “This is bigger than us again,” Jan told him.
She took the pipes, and sat up in the living room with Chris until morning. Their plan was to take him to the methadone clinic the next day, and then find him a detox bed.
But after the appointment, he refused to go to detox. He was 39 years old. There was nothing they could do. This had happened before: he spent a few days panhandling in Boston around the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard. And then he came home, abashed and guilty, and asked for help. And they had started the cycle again.
This time, Bryan didn’t come home. Instead, he headed to a place a friend told him about, an abandoned camper in the woods off of Route 28, on a slope above a river running with icy water. There was snow on the ground, and at night the temperature dropped precipitously.
Jan could see where he was; she tracked his phone location. As it got darker, she watched his blue dot, and watched the weather, and worried.
In the days that followed, it snowed more. A group of Bryan’s friends, guys he’d known since high school, formed a search party. When they reached the trailer by the river, his phone was inside. He was not.
In the four years since that day, his bank accounts have sat untouched. His credit cards have never been used. People have occasionally reported spotting a man who looked like him around Brockton or near Mass. and Cass, also known as methadone mile, in Boston. Once below an underpass. Once on the sidewalk, asking for a cup of coffee. If only he’d had a tattoo, or a visible scar. But no, he looked like so many other men out there: white, not tall, not short, kind eyes.
Jan and Chris would like to move, to downsize, but “it feels like an abandonment,” Jan says. Bryan had once told her that the first time he did cocaine, it felt like “home.” What if he comes back to this home, his real home, and they aren’t there?
They believe he is alive. A body has never been found, and besides, they would just know. But there is one thing that nags. Bryan’s defining trait, his whole life, had been his kindness — kindness to animals, kindness to homeless people, kindness to family. Even in his lowest moments, he never stole from them, never yelled at them, but was humble and grateful and ashamed to put them through this. How could he be this cruel?
Because that’s the only word for it. To let Mother’s Day pass, and his sister’s birthday, and Christmas. To let them wonder for four years whether he is alive? “It’s not like Bry,” Jan says.
Behind the figures that shuffle in and out of the clinics and shelters around Massachusetts Avenue, who sleep on the wet sidewalks or around the U-Haul parking lot, who hunch in trances of fentanyl or twitch in the dizzying grips of meth, are the people looking for them. Friends, sometimes, but more often parents looking for children — or children for parents.
Many of them end up in a group on Facebook. It’s called Missing on Mass Ave and it has more than 51,000 members, two of whom are the Hogans. Members post photos of friends and family with pleas for information. Some are of people who have been missing for days or weeks, others for years.
Since 2023, when the city cleared the tent encampment that radiated from Atkinson Street, near Mass. and Cass, the problem has been less visible. Police are now everywhere: They shoo addicts from corner to corner.
Still, the desolate, needle-strewn mile around the intersection acts as a magnet for addicts who come for the cluster of services — methadone clinics, food pantries, shelters — as well as for the drug dealers and human traffickers who profit from abject human suffering.
Lydia Riel went there to look for her boyfriend, Noah, seven years ago. Now, they use together: crystal meth, benzos, crack, clonidine, johnnies, methadone, and a half gallon of vodka every day, she estimates.
The Facebook group was started by Dawn Cobb in 2021. She hadn’t heard from her son, Brandon, in two months, but after she posted his photo, someone spotted him within a few hours. “There’s eyes everywhere,” she says. The group grew, and now has a handful of moderators who approve posts, often 10 or 15 of them a day.
When she and I first spoke last year, Brandon was in jail, which she described as a “godsend.” “I’ve slept for 10 months,” Cobb said. Shortly afterward, he was released. He relapsed three months later.
Some of the people on the Facebook page are users themselves, or former addicts looking for people they used to share the streets with. Sometimes they are posting because they’re too scared to go out looking in person — searching carries the risk of being sucked back in.
Lydia Riel went there to look for her boyfriend, Noah, seven years ago. Now, they use together: crystal meth, benzos, crack, clonidine, johnnies, methadone, and a half gallon of vodka every day, she estimates.
“You get stuck,” she said. “You get stuck out here.”
On the day I met them last spring, they were arguing on Southampton Street. He wanted to sell the bright white sneakers a charity worker gave him; she thought he looked nice in them.
“We’re going to be hurting really soon, baby,” Noah said, exasperated. They were out of pills and only had a fifth of vodka left. “It’s just reality.”
This was hard to argue with. She relented, and he trudged away to find a buyer.
Lydia doesn’t know if anyone is looking for her. She cries when she thinks about her teenage son, but the one time she worked up the nerve to call, he didn’t want to talk to her. “I’m sure he hates me,” she said.
Her dad wrote her a letter some years ago. She isn’t quite sure how she got it; she’s been in and out of detox some 30 times, she guesses, so perhaps there. The pills she is taking make it hard to remember his words and she thinks for nearly a full minute, swaying in the rain while trucks thunder past.
Her father wrote something about a hole she left behind, she finally said. A hole that keeps getting bigger.
One day last spring, I had been standing with a group of volunteers when a shoeless young Black man walked up with tears dripping onto his shirt.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, pointlessly — everything was wrong.
He took a sandwich, and one for his friend who stood a little bit apart, a young white man with blue eyes. There were dozens of people out that day, but I noticed them because of the way they seemed to be looking out for each other.
About a week later, I was scrolling through the Missing on Mass Ave Facebook page, past photos of missing people adorned with prayer emojis, recovery mantras, and pleas for rides to detox centers.
“This might be a long shot but I just want to make sure my ex girlfriend is still alive and okay.”
“I’m back in treatment. But need someone to help me find my boyfriend to relay a message to him or else I’m scared I’m going to end up leaving to try to find him myself.”
“I’m looking to go into a residential program with my newborn baby. Anyone know of any? I am currently homeless, in recovery & just gave birth easter Sunday.”
A face stopped me. I thought I recognized the hard brow, the blue eyes. The plea came from Kristie, a mom in Western Massachusetts looking for her son, Kody.
A few days later, I met Kristie on Albany Street, near Boston Medical Center. She had never been to the area, but she had seen videos online of what looked like the raw edge of human suffering: brawls, open wounds, people slumped and lifeless.
She was scared. But she had to find Kody soon. The judge back home had given her a Section 35, an order that expired in five days. The order meant that if she found her son, he would be forced to go into treatment for the addiction that had taken over his life.
She couldn’t believe how many people were out here. How could they all be living like this — and yet they all seemed to feel sorry for her.
“This is my son,” she managed, holding up her phone to a blond woman with track marks ribboning her arms. “I brought him down here for treatment and” — in spite of herself, Kristie’s face crumpled — “and he ran away.”
“Oh, oh,” said the woman, distressed. “I hate it when the mommies cry.” She cast about her, as if her shopping cart held something that could help. “You’re going to find him, Mommy. You will.”
She took Kristie’s number, promising to find a way to call if she saw him, though she didn’t have a phone.
“You have beautiful eyes, just like my son,” Kristie told her, beginning to cry again. She couldn’t believe how many people were out here. How could they all be living like this — and yet they all seemed to feel sorry for her.
We trailed through the usual spots: the parking lot outside of the Woods Mullen women’s shelter, outside the Mobil station with the locked bathrooms, and the church whose congregants step over prone bodies on their way to services.
It seemed like everyone had seen Kody, or thought they had. He had been in the men’s shelter, maybe. On the corner, by the McDonald’s. A woman working at a methadone clinic wasn’t allowed to tell Kristie anything because of patient confidentiality rules, but she couldn’t stand to watch her crying. Yes, he’d been here, she said.
Two hours later, I saw him. A blue baseball cap and stringy hair, all angles.
Kody was outside the needle exchange, in a group we had just been showing his photo. Your mom is here, they were telling him. Your mom is here.
He turned to look at Kristie and his eyes were red-ringed. The buttons on his shirt were done up wrong. He’s thin, very thin, and Kristie, 6 feet tall and broad, ran to wrap him in a bear hug. She sobbed. He accepted the embrace, dazed.
“You see, Mommy?” the woman with the blue eyes said, appearing behind them, beaming. “He’s OK! You found him, Mommy!”
Two days later and a mile away, Courtney Flynn locked the door to a bathroom in the C-6 South Boston police station, and threw up. The anxiety had been rising in her all day and she couldn’t hold it in any longer.
She had come to file a missing persons report for her sister. Kerri, her twin, born 29 minutes before her. Kerri, who slept beneath her on the bottom bunk. Kerri, the smart one, the studious one, the shy one. Kerri, who she last saw months before looking dopesick and emaciated in a South Boston courtroom, before she was released just to vanish onto the streets again.
Now, at the station, the cops were kind, but decisive. They all know Kerri, they said. They see her all the time. She’s not missing missing.
“But she is going to die,” Courtney said, planting herself in front of the officer on duty. Tears of frustration streaked her makeup. “She is going to die out there.”
The officer said he was sorry. There was nothing he could do.
Kerri had to want to come home — that’s what everyone always said. No one would choose this, Courtney thought. Want was beside the point. Want exists in another world from this one, the one where her sister spends her nights stealing packages from stoops so her days can be softened with plastic baggies of powder.
But Courtney could see the officer was right. Even if they found her, Kerri would be long gone by the time Courtney got there.
Back outside the station, a light rain was falling. Courtney called Kerri’s old number angrily, reflexively. No answer.
Sometimes, and Courtney can’t bear to admit this, she would almost be relieved if it were over. She has been looking for Kerri, and finding Kerri, and losing Kerri, for 13 years. When Kerri disappeared a few weeks prior, Courtney’s anxiety spiked, and she lost 25 pounds. She is taking medicine after two stress-related seizures in one week.
When Courtney saw Kerri in court, where she had been brought up on shoplifting charges, she looked “like a skeleton,” she says, “not anything like the person I remember.” Courtney caught her eye and mouthed, “Why?” Kerri just shook her head.
Courtney already knew why, or at least some of it. When their brother Ryan died of an overdose in 2013, “Kerri died, too,” she says. And then, the next year, their mother died of breast cancer. Their mom had struggled in the early years of their childhood, but she got her act together. “She was our best friend,” Courtney says. But at some point between the two deaths, Kerri started taking pain pills, and then moved on to harder drugs.
Out near the intersection that afternoon, Courtney walked from group to group, handing out fliers with a photo of Kerri from when she wasn’t so sick — a smiling girl with black hair and green eyes.
She had been afraid of the other addicts, but person after person consoled her. Many of them knew Kerri, from the streets or her stints in jail.
“I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”
“I’ll ride around this afternoon and see if I can find her.”
“You’re going to find her, sweetheart.”
“It’s going to be OK, I promise.”
“She’s probably embarrassed,” a young man with a chipped front tooth offered quietly. “It’s embarrassing. You don’t want your family to see you like this. Like, I know my mom is looking for me like you guys are looking, but...” his voice trailed off. His nose was scraped and bloody.
Back when Kerri would take her calls, a strange man sometimes answered. “I am just so scared of what she might be letting people do to her body,” Courtney says. Please let it just be stealing.
On Albany Street, in front of Boston Medical Center, a tall, grave man with a face tattoo said the thing she didn’t want to hear. Wincing as if he were weighing what to say, he finally said, “I seen her tricking downtown.”
A police car stopped in front of the group and everyone began to scatter, while Courtney tried to hear more. “She gotta be real careful out there,” the man said as he wheeled his bike away. “A lot of girls have been getting hurt recently.”
A few blocks away, in an alley by a self-storage facility, Courtney called to a very young woman preparing to inject herself behind a U-Haul truck. She had a bright, determined face, dotted with freckles and fresh sores. She nodded fervently when Courtney held up the photo. “I saw her with my homegirl like two weeks ago.” They were getting into a car with a guy, she said, “going on a date.”
The guy had raped her friend, the woman said in a tumble of words. But she didn’t know what had happened to Kerri.
She pushed the needle in.
Courtney stood very still as the woman continued to talk. This was the bad thing. People had seen Kerri since then, so the very worst hadn’t happened. But what did happen to her sister? The young woman’s face began to cloud and look vague. She was slipping someplace else.
It was midafternoon, under a lead sky. There were still so many places left to look. The other shelters, the clinics, under the bridges. But Courtney’s bartending shift was starting soon, and she had to check in on her grandparents first. She wanted to throw up again, but there are no bathrooms open to the public here.
She would come back, she decided, this time with a Section 35 order from a judge. And in the meantime, maybe someone would tell Kerri that her sister was looking for her.
On the sidewalk outside the needle exchange, Kristie was frozen in indecision. She had done it. She had found Kody. Should she still call the police? Would he run? Or could she get him to come with her?
As Kody sat on the wheelchair ramp in front of the building, Kristie whispered desperately to a security guard stationed on the sidewalk. He couldn’t section someone, he said, but the police could if she had the paper.
The paper? “The judge didn’t say anything about having a paper,” Kristie pleaded under her breath. She thought it would be in a system someplace, that she just had to find him and the mechanisms would click into place: They would pick him up and put him in treatment and he would be safe.
“I can call in a family disturbance, that’s all I can do,” the guard said.
Kristie stalled for time, trying to think. Yes, call them, she nodded.
She pulled out her inhaler.
She only had so much time. Kody wanted drugs, he told her. He would come with her if she got him drugs.
Would the police actually come? She took out her phone to call 911 herself, but her hands were shaking too hard. Kody turned his head toward us. He might run if he heard her. She put her phone away. She was just going to have to do it.
“I’m going to take him to buy drugs and then I’m going to take him home,” she whispered to me. “That is the only way I can get him in the car. I have to take him to buy drugs.”
They began walking down Albany Street, toward the parking garage. Kristie was trying to walk slowly, to buy time. At last, a police cruiser pulled up next to them and two officers got out. “Do you need help?” one of the officers asked gently. “Is everything OK?”
Kristie stared mutely, trying to communicate with her eyes. She wanted them to arrest him, but Kody had already agreed to come with her. What if he ran and got hurt? What if she didn’t have the right documents and they couldn’t hold him? She began to shake. She reached for the inhaler.
The officers told her to breathe, to take her time. Then they asked her again: “Do you need help?”
“No,” she finally said. “I’m taking him home.”
One officer looked hard at Kody, who stood absently, not seeming to process what was happening. “There’s nothing for you out here, son,” he said slowly. “You’ll end up either coming with me or going up there.” He pointed to the sky.
The officers got back in their cruiser.
At the garage, Kody waited by the car.
Kristie hadn’t brought her debit cards because she was worried that, if we found him, Kody would somehow get ahold of them, so she had to pay for her parking ticket in cash. As she opened her wallet, she was trembling so hard the woman in the cashier’s booth tried to reassure her.
“Take your time,” she said. “It’s going to be OK.”
Kristie slid the woman a fifty dollar bill, apologizing to her, to me, to everyone in line waiting to pay. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. The screen on the register flashed: $42.
Kristie panicked. “$42? Wait, it’s $42?” All she had was the fifty. She didn’t even know what drugs cost. She needed to be able to buy something to tide Kody over. But no, $42 was the change, she still had plenty. She laughed shakily.
Back out in the parking lot, Kristie gripped a railing and dry heaved. She was having an asthma attack, or a panic attack. Her partner died by suicide a few years ago, and that was the last time she could remember her body rebelling like this. But she needed to pull it together. She had to drive.
She pulled herself up on the railing and took a deep breath.
“I’m going to take him to get drugs,” she said, “and then I’m going to take him home.”
Courtney had told me that if she ever found her sister, she would want to deliver a message: Kerri is loved. Recovery is possible. But when they came face-to-face in a dingy room in South Boston Municipal Court, that is not what happened.
A few weeks after Courtney tried to file the missing persons report, Kerri had been picked up with stolen items and a small bag of cocaine. Unable to post bail, she was sent to jail.
We had been waiting almost an hour and a half, together with Dana Lynott, the twins’ childhood best friend, when Kerri’s name was called.
She was a tiny thing, a scrap, hard to see over the stand. She couldn’t have been more than 90 pounds. Her hair was shorn, with several inches of gray at the root. But she was clearly sober. Later, Dana said it’s the best she’s looked in a long time.
Courtney had been agitated all morning — by the traffic, by the courtroom delays, by the fact that the detective on the case hadn’t met us as promised. She was asking everyone — the prosecutors, the public defender — to please keep Kerri in jail, where she was safe.
Now, as Kerri was brought in, she locked eyes with her.
Why? Courtney mouthed again.
Kerri’s face hardened. Fuck you, she mouthed back.
As the prosecutor detailed Kerri’s history of theft charges, Courtney seemed to tip over the edge.
“We’re not bailing you out!” she snapped out loud. She was nearly out of her seat. People turned to look.
“You reap what you sow!” she hissed, tears of rage running down her face.
The court officers on the bench in front of us turned to look at Courtney. Dana took her by the shoulders, trying to quiet her.
Kerri’s public defender began to speak. “It’s clear that she’s struggling. She needs help.” Kerri seemed to gain confidence as his voice built, making the case that she shouldn’t be locked up until her next court date. “She’s sitting in jail on two $500 bails,” he said. “Certainly freedom is for sale, your honor.” Kerri smiled slightly.
Kerri wasn’t released: $750 of additional bail was added to her count, and she was led through the doors behind the judge, back into custody.
Afterward, in the lobby of the courthouse, I asked Courtney. “You told me you wanted to tell her you love and miss her. What happened?”
“She doesn’t care about anybody,” she said, almost pleadingly.
Later that day, the public defender texted me. “Locking someone up so you do not have to worry about them is draconian,” he wrote. “They want her punished for how she has made them feel.”
Sergeant Matt Murphy, of the Brockton Police Department, can still navigate by sight through the brush and mud to the last spot Bryan Hogan was known to be. There was little sign of the trailer on a recent spring afternoon, just empty 40s and the wire skeletons of mattresses perched above the swollen river.
It’s possible Bryan died here, Murphy says. “People go missing in the woods, and then their bodies are found 20 years later by somebody stumbling across it.” Back when he was a detective, he spent the days after Bryan’s disappearance searching these woods.
But he also knows it’s not that hard to vanish. If you’re homeless, you use cash. You get your meals from a food bank. You just have to stay out of trouble with the police. With so many people out there, you become “one fish in a school of fish.”
When Bryan first went missing, Murphy got a number of tips, some more credible than others. A woman who knew Bryan said she saw him getting onto a bus. Someone thought they saw him panhandling outside the McDonald’s on Mass. Ave. A man who worked at a day shelter nearby told Murphy — even though he wasn’t supposed to — that someone using Bryan’s name and date of birth had visited a few days before.
Murphy can’t say for sure, but he thinks Bryan is probably alive. Sometimes when he drives into Boston, past Mass. and Cass, he imagines looking at the clusters of panhandlers on the median and seeing him. “I’d just turn my head and he’d be there,” he says.
This case is the only one he can’t leave at work, he says. “You see horrible things all the time, devastated people, and you can’t take that home with you.” But something about the Hogans is different. “I essentially accomplished nothing for them,” he says, and yet they continue to be so grateful.
Murphy seems protective of Jan, who he always refers to as “Mrs. Hogan.” He gets enraged when he thinks about some of the charlatans who’ve come out of the woodwork pretending to be psychics with clues to Bryan’s whereabouts, or mediums with messages from beyond the grave.
Sometimes he gets mad at Bryan, too. “Honestly, that’s a feeling that I have quite a bit. Resentment towards him for — and I know you can’t really feel that way — but resentment towards him for putting his family through that.”
It’s very different for him and for the Hogans. “I’m just the cop who worked on it for a while,” he says.
But still. “It’s not done for me either.”
In May, Kody will reach a full year of sobriety. The Globe is not using his last name to protect his privacy. When Kristie is driving on the highway, she often has flashbacks to that day in Boston, the worst of her life, and has to pull over. But she is beginning to sleep through the night again.
Kerri Flynn declined to speak to the Globe. She and Courtney last exchanged messages on their birthday in March. “Happy birthday twinny pants,” Kerri wrote. “Loves you.” She was in a sober home. She disappeared again soon after.
The four-year anniversary of Bryan Hogan’s disappearance came in February.
When Jan thinks about Bryan, when she wants to talk to her son, she sometimes posts notes to him on the Missing on Mass Ave group.
“The only thing I need for Mother’s Day is you!”
“I dreamt you called your sister on her birthday today. Dreams can come true.”
“Please forgive yourself for falling and let us help you pick yourself up.”
“Please don’t let it be one more day our sweet boy — You can find your way home❣️”
“You are always just a kiss away from me my Beautiful Boy.”
One afternoon, Jan put the question that haunts her to Ali, a young man at the needle exchange on Albany Street, where she and Chris had come to hand out MISSING fliers with Bryan’s photo. It was the question that sometimes makes her fear the worst. How could he know that we’re suffering and not reach out?
Ali was high but cogent, swaying a little as he gripped the counter by the entrance. Behind him, people were waiting in line to shoot up in the bathroom, before they stumbled out onto couches where rows of people drifted in and out of consciousness. Neat plastic tubs of sterilizing wipes and tourniquets lined the wall. It’s a place where they can find respite, not from suffering, but from being raped or attacked or robbed while they get high.
Ali still had his teeth, and his face hadn’t sunken like some others. “Ali, like Muhammad Ali,” he offered with a smile when he met us.
Jan showed him Bryan’s picture. “It is eating at him,” Ali guessed. “I know how bad it’s eating at him because it’s eating at me. I haven’t called my mom in six months. It’s the shame, you know?”
“Call your mother,” Jan commanded, fiercely. Ali’s phone sat on the narrow counter in front of us. He deflected. “I know,” he said. “I know, I should.”
“I’m a mother,” Jan pleaded. You don’t have to get clean today, she told him, but his mother deserves to know he’s alive. “She deserves for you to just say ‘I love you, I’m thinking of you.’ That’s it. That’ll be enough for today.”
Ali seemed to wilt. He picked up his phone, and unlocked it. He looked at it for a long moment, and put it back down on the counter.
Annalisa Quinn can be reached at annalisa.quinn@globe.com. Follow her @annalisa_quinn.