Gabriel Scott Johnson was a seven-month-old male infant from Tempe, Arizona, when he vanished during the final days of 2009. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children lists Gabriel as missing since December 27, 2009, from Tempe, Arizona. He was born May 3, 2009, and would now be 17 years old. Although Tempe is the official missing location, investigators later established that Gabriel had been taken from Arizona to San Antonio, Texas, by his mother, Elizabeth Johnson.
Tempe police said surveillance footage and witness accounts proved Gabriel was seen alive in San Antonio, while later evidence showed Elizabeth left the city alone. Contemporary reports sometimes described Gabriel as eight months old because he was approaching that age when he disappeared. His case would become one of the most troubling unresolved child disappearances connected to both Arizona and Texas, because from the beginning investigators were confronted with sharply conflicting explanations about what happened to him.
Months before Gabriel disappeared, tensions surrounding his custody and possible adoption had already begun shaping the events that followed. According to the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, Elizabeth traveled to Boston with Gabriel in June 2009 after a disagreement with Gabriel's father, Logan McQueary. During her return trip to Arizona, she met Tammi Peters Smith during an airport layover in Indianapolis and discussed the possibility of Smith and her husband adopting Gabriel. By December, after Elizabeth and McQueary had ended their relationship, Elizabeth contacted Smith again. On December 9, she gave Gabriel to the Smiths along with temporary guardianship paperwork, despite McQueary's opposition to the adoption. McQueary refused to sign away his parental rights. A family court subsequently awarded Elizabeth and McQueary joint legal custody on December 17 and directed that McQueary was to have physical custody beginning December 20. When he attempted to make arrangements to receive his son, prosecutors later said Elizabeth told him he would never see Gabriel again. She then left Arizona with the baby and drove toward Texas, setting in motion the disappearance that has never been satisfactorily explained.
Elizabeth and Gabriel reached San Antonio, where reporting from the time placed them at local motels between December 22 and December 27. Police later identified surveillance footage and witnesses showing Gabriel alive there. One contemporary San Antonio report stated that Gabriel was last seen with his mother at their hotel on December 26, while the official missing-child record uses December 27 as the missing date; the broader investigation establishes that he was in San Antonio during that period before Elizabeth departed without him. During the trip, Elizabeth sent disturbing text messages to McQueary claiming that she had killed Gabriel, and she repeated the claim during a telephone conversation that McQueary recorded and reported to Tempe police. Yet after she was located in Miami Beach, Florida, on December 30, Gabriel was not with her, and she offered an entirely different account. Elizabeth claimed she had given Gabriel to an unidentified couple in a San Antonio park and later provided several variations of that story. Investigators were never able to verify that such a transfer took place or identify a couple who had taken custody of Gabriel. The two versions of events — that Gabriel had been killed and discarded, or that he had been secretly given away — became the central and unresolved contradiction of the case.
Because of the statements concerning Gabriel's possible death, investigators pursued the possibility that he had been killed in San Antonio. In early 2010, San Antonio police undertook an enormous search at the Tessman Road Landfill after determining that trash from the hotel where Elizabeth had stayed could have been taken there. Officers, contractors and volunteers searched 4,260 tons of trash and debris over 16 days. The search ended without finding Gabriel, his remains, or evidence establishing that a homicide had occurred. San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said at the time that investigators could not determine whether Gabriel was alive or dead and that the missing-person case would remain open, with the homicide unit prepared to investigate any information suggesting foul play. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was returned to Arizona and prosecuted for conduct surrounding Gabriel's disappearance. She was indicted on kidnapping, child abuse, conspiracy to commit custodial interference and custodial interference; the child-abuse count was later dismissed. Tammi Peters Smith was separately convicted of conspiracy to commit custodial interference and forgery. After a 14-day trial in 2012, Elizabeth was convicted of unlawful imprisonment and two custodial-interference counts, while the jury did not reach a verdict on the kidnapping charge. She was sentenced to 5.25 years in the Arizona Department of Corrections, with credit for nearly three years already spent in custody and additional probation ordered after her release. Those convictions established responsibility for unlawfully keeping Gabriel from his father, but they did not determine what ultimately happened to the child.
The passage of years has not ended the search. Gabriel's father continued trying to find him and later began working with Project Absentis, a nonprofit involving former and retired federal investigators who reexamined records and leads in the case. The renewed effort also exposed confusion over which police department was responsible for the long-term missing-person investigation. Tempe police explained that once surveillance and witnesses established Gabriel had been alive in San Antonio, the missing-child investigation was transferred to San Antonio authorities in January 2010, although Tempe continued forwarding tips and assisting with Arizona-related matters. San Antonio police subsequently confirmed that it still had an active missing-person case for Gabriel and said tangible leads continued to be investigated. Project Absentis likewise currently lists Gabriel's case as active, while NCMEC continues to publish his missing-child poster and an age-progressed image, asking anyone with information to contact law enforcement. Gabriel's disappearance therefore remains a painful mystery centered on a very young child who was caught in an escalating custody conflict, taken more than a thousand miles from home, last confirmed alive in San Antonio, and then separated from the only adult known to have been traveling with him. Extensive searches, years of investigation, criminal trials, convictions and repeated examinations of possible leads have never produced a verified adoption, a confirmed location, or definitive evidence explaining Gabriel's fate. In overview, the case remains defined by those two incompatible accounts from his mother and by the absence of the one thing Gabriel's family and investigators have sought since December 2009: a reliable answer to where Gabriel Scott Johnson went after he was last seen in San Antonio.Last Seen: Dec 27, 2009
