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(NewsNation) — David Brown disappeared while on a walk on his brother’s Florida property and nearly two months later, his wife is desperate to find him and bring him home.
David Brown was facing a cancer diagnosis
Amy Brown describes her husband as a wonderful husband and grandfather.
The couple have been married for more than a quarter century, with David Brown turning 70 on Sunday. They were building a new home together, living their dreams and planning the rest of their lives when Brown received a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. One thing that worries his wife is that he has been without necessary medications since he disappeared.
“He was all about fighting it. He wanted to fight it, go through the chemotherapy and everything he had to do,” Amy Brown said.
Brown said her husband wanted to see his brother in Florida and she drove him down on Aug. 12, 2024. She returned home to go to work and one day later, got the call he was missing.
One of the things David Brown wanted to do with his brother was visit an oak tree on the family’s 194-acre property. The tree had limbs that stretched up to the heavens and Brown and his brother had prayed there on a previous visit.
When the pair went out in a golf cart, they found a fallen tree across the trail. Brown’s brother went to get some equipment to move the tree.
“And David said in his state of mind, ok, I’m going to move on, I’m going to go see the tree with this dog,” Amy Brown said. “And that was the last anybody saw him.”
David Brown disappears
The dog, Snoopy, was trained as a guardian protector. When he returned without David Brown, Brown’s brother called Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis and they began a search within hours.
“We have had our helicopter up, our drones up all night long,” Nienhuis said. “We’ve had ground crews looking for Mr. Brown, ATVs and UTVs. We’ve had our patrol dogs trying to pick up a scent.”
The sheriff’s office searched a one-and-a-half mile radius for six days before calling the search off and classifying Brown as a missing persons case.
Non-profit investigators We Are the Essentials stepped in after that, using dogs and searching on foot, often on their hands and knees, for two weeks in Florida’s unforgiving terrain.
Brown was seen on surviellance and trail cameras several times on the morning of Aug. 13, said We Are the Essentials member Shelley Croft.
“He was seen on the trail cam with the dog and he had some wildflowers in his hand and when he was seen on that cam, he’s missing his glasses,” Croft said. “The glasses, one of his shoes and one of his socks were found in that location of the initial trail cam.”
There was a barbed wire fence nearby and bloodhounds tracked Brown’s movements there. Investigators believe he climbed under the fence, ripping his shirt. They found dog hair caught in the fence as well.
“We actually took samples of the dog hair and we were able to confirm that it was hair from the dog that he was actually with when he walked off,” said investigator Nico Toscani.
Brown made his way off the family property and wandered over to a neighboring house, where he stopped to ask for directions to the tree.
“I think he really got lost and the Florida wilderness is very non-forgiving,” Amy Brown said. “The last camera video with the woman he talked to, he said ‘I am lost.’ And he was truly lost. I wish at that point we knew more.”
Is David Brown in a homeless encampment?
There was one potential sighting of David Brown the following morning on busy Spring Lake Road, about two and a half miles from his brother’s property. But the man who thinks he saw Brown didn’t call it in for weeks.
“It was 5 o’clock in the morning and he said one thing that stood out to me, was that the back of his shirt was open, which is clearly how David’s shirt was on the videos that he was seen on,” Croft said. “He said he looked very disheveled and he thought he was homeless, and the problem is that he could have very well been mistaken as someone who was homeless based on his appearance.”
Amy Brown hopes her husband may be lost somewhere in a homeless camp, in a place where someone will be able to help him find his way back home.
“I think he got a ride. He is a salesman and he can sell ice to an Eskimo and so he may have convinced somebody to help him,” Brown said. “When he went missing, he was definitely confused and not in his right mind. If David is alive, he is somewhere in a homeless encampment. I’m just desperately asking for answers.”
In the meantime, she faces milestones alone, with David Brown’s 70th birthday on Oct. 6 and their 27th wedding anniversary on Oct. 10.