On February 26, 2024, Katie Proudfoot, a resident of Hendersonville, Tennessee, went to wake her 14-year-old son, Sebastian, to take him to school. To her surprise, he was nowhere to be found in the house or inside his room. It is one of the strangest cases the FBI is currently facing.
Sebastian Wayne Drake Rogers had spent the day before with his mother. The pair went shopping at a department store, played video games at a bowling alley, and had dinner at a local restaurant before returning home for the night. After returning to their home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, Katie and Sebastian prepared to go to sleep, saying goodbye to each other at some point between 9 and 10 p.m. Sebastian is autistic and may have gone outside and become disoriented.
The case has been posted on the FBI website since early September. “Katie told us that just before 10 p.m. she heard a loud thud coming from Sebastian’s room, so she cried out to ask if he was okay, to which he replied that he was,” said Detective Brandon Carter, of the Sumner County Sheriff’s Office. “Katie told him to go to bed because they had to wake early for school the next morning,” added the investigator.
After that, Katie called her husband, who was out of town in southwestern Tennessee for work, and the two spoke for almost two hours before she went to sleep around midnight. The next morning began the start of what would become a nightmare and a massive search effort for Sebastian.
“Katie called her husband and told him she could not find Sebastian; he was not in his room nor anywhere in the house,” explained Carter. Katie got into her car and drove around the neighborhood toward Sebastian’s school, which was less than a mile from their home, looking for the boy before returning home.
During this time, her husband called the local emergency communications center to report that Sebastian was missing.
In the early days of the fruitless search, it seemed that Sebastian had disappeared without a trace. “This case was a kind of question mark,” said Robert Barrett, a special agent with the FBI in Nashville. That question mark grew as the search progressed.
THE FBI CONFIRMED THAT THE BOY TOOK NOTHING
“Sebastian did not take clothing, shoes, money, food or his mobile phone,” said Carter. “His phone and the cash were on the dining room table, where they had been the day before when he went to bed. According to Katie, she believed a small yellow flashlight was missing, but it was the only thing that seemed to have disappeared from the house,” added the investigator.
The first week “the search extended to a radius of approximately seven and a half kilometers around Sebastian’s home. There were about 2,000 people equipped with an app that tracked their movements. Searchers could also use the app to locate objects on a map they watched while searching. The total area covered within that seven-and-a-half-kilometer radius equaled a total of 18,000 hectares,” explained Carter.
In addition to ground searchers, law enforcement used all resources available to locate Sebastian: fire departments, mounted patrols, all-terrain vehicles, search-and-rescue dogs, drones, helicopters and even a plane. During the second day of the search, the Sumner County Sheriff’s Department contacted the FBI to request help and specific resources that could potentially help locate Sebastian, who has autism.
“I contacted our FBI Child Abduction Rapid Deployment team for an initial consultation, and then they requested the assistance of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit,” Barrett said. “The BAU shared a statistic: approximately 50% of autistic children are prone to wandering. They are also drawn to water, and 71% of fatal outcomes for missing autistic children are due to drowning. That information helped us focus the search on bodies of water and their surroundings. The search team drained ponds and searched streams and lakes for Sebastian,” the agent added.
Additionally, authorities checked the neighborhood homes, the video footage from nearby houses, and Katie’s dashboard camera showing that the woman and Sebastian did not leave the house after returning from dinner and that no other car was seen entering or leaving Katie’s house during the afternoon and early morning of the day Sebastian disappeared.
“We understand the community’s desire for answers and for us to explain every step of this investigation, but we cannot reveal all case details without risking the integrity of the investigation. We ask the community to focus on what matters most: finding Sebastian. Staying united and supportive will bring us closer to the answers we seek,” Carter explained.
The best way to help locate Sebastian is to quickly share tips and information with the Sumner County Sheriff’s Office, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, or the FBI.
Sebastian stands 1.65 m tall and weighed between 50 and 53 kg the last time he was seen. He has brown hair and hazel or brown eyes. He would currently be 16 years old. Sebastian has medical conditions, including autism, that could affect his ability to return home safely without assistance.
The FBI offers a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to Sebastian’s whereabouts. The Sumner County Sheriff’s Office, the TBI, and the FBI continue to collaborate, sharing tips and information, and urging the public to help law enforcement in the hope of bringing Sebastian home.
THE GREEN SWEATER THEORY
After the alert, a video circulated of Sebastian and Katie in the parking lot of the local restaurant they visited the night the boy disappeared. In the video, a person wearing a green sweatshirt briefly interacts with Katie. Suspicions arose that, in this brief interaction, the person in the green sweatshirt was planning something with Katie related to Sebastian’s disappearance.
The authorities spoke with restaurant staff, who confirmed that the green-sweater person was a frequent customer and helped identify him. The authorities went to see this person, who happened to wear the same green sweatshirt as in the video, and confirmed that he was not a suspect.
