Brian Shaffer was last seen on April 1, 2006, between 1:30 and 2:00 a.m. at the Ugly Tuna Saloona, a bar near the Ohio State University (OSU) campus. He went there with a few male friends to celebrate the start of spring break and had a few shots of hard liquor.
He was last seen in the bar talking to two college-aged women. No one has ever heard from him again. The bar’s security cameras catch him going into the building, but not leaving.
After Shaffer went missing, his car was found parked at his apartment, which is near the Ugly Tuna Saloona. His cell phone, credit cards, and bank accounts have not been used since he went missing, and none of his personal items went with him.
People who care about Shaffer say that his disappearance is very strange. He was in his second year of medical school at OSU when he went missing. He had great grades.
He and his girlfriend, who is also a medical student, were supposed to take a spring break trip to Miami, Florida, on April 3, two days after he went missing. After he missed the flight, his family said he was missing.
Shaffer loved his girlfriend, and he was rumored to be planning to marry her. His mother had cancer and died three weeks before he went missing. He had been close to her and was sad about her death, but his family and friends said he wasn’t too sad or thinking about killing himself.
Shaffer’s apartment was broken into in May 2006. It turned out that the burglary had nothing to do with why he went missing. Shaffer’s father looked for his son’s body in the Olentangy River after he went missing, but he didn’t find anything. In September 2008, his father died in a freak accident. His younger brother is the only living relative of Shaffer.
Authorities don’t think Shaffer left on his own, but they don’t know why he hasn’t been seen since. He finished high school at Pickerington in 1997 and went to OSU to get a bachelor’s degree in microbiology in 2003. Shaffer’s case hasn’t been figured out yet.
