Monroe mother knows her missing son isn’t coming home

Published 10:44 pm Monday, February 1, 2010

MONROE — The most recent photo Lori Bowling has of her son is the one on his driver’s license.

Brock Holmes, 23, was happy when the license arrived in the mail Oct. 7. A few hours later, he left his mother’s home in unincorporated Snohomish County to go out with friends.

His family hasn’t seen him since.

Holmes’ smiling face on the sky-blue background once was plastered all over TV screens, the social networking site Facebook and in newspapers. As time has dragged on, he became just another face among the legions of men, women and children missing throughout the country at any given time.

That’s hardly a consolation for a mother’s heart.

“Every ditch I drive by, I’m looking in it,” Bowling said. She suspects foul play and believes her son is dead.

“It’s not like Brock to just walk away,” Bowling said. “My son is not coming home. I know it.”

Some friends Holmes had met not long before picked him up that night. He was wearing a dark-blue shirt with white stripes down the sleeves, cargo-style blue jeans and brown shoes. He had his iPod, cell phone and $150 with him.

The group reportedly hit a couple of bars in the area, then headed to Holmes’ friends house on Florence Acres Road. Holmes reportedly was seen leaving.

There’s been no sign of him since.

Snohomish County Sheriff’s detectives haven’t learned much. They still are treating the disappearance as a missing person’s case, spokeswoman Rebecca Hover said.

As time passed, a mother’s sense of frustration and despair has grown.

“It’s been tough,” Bowling said.

She rounded up volunteers to search the route her son would have taken home. They searched other places in the area, too. Up and down Florence Acres Road. Up and down Old Owen Road.

Tips poured in when news first spread of the young man’s disappearance. People claimed they saw him in Spokane. Others said he was picked up hitchhiking in Index and dropped off in Wenatchee.

Friends called. Psychics called, too. They were mostly friends of friends and didn’t want money. Frustrated with how little she knew about the case, Bowling listened to their hazy clues.

“It was heart-wrenching, because I wanted so bad to believe,” she said.

She enrolled her 15-year-old daughter Kaylle in counseling.

Holmes moved in with Bowling in May, when he decided to put his life back on track. He had fallen in with the wrong crowd a few years earlier and left the east Snohomish County area for Skagit County, where he drifted. He also lived with his father in Sedro-Woolley for some time.

He got a job at a Chevron gas station in Sultan and worked hard. He loved being with his family.

“He was an extremely happy young man,” Bowling said. “He didn’t see the bad in anybody.”

Katya Yefimova: 425-339-3452, kyefimova@heraldnet.com.