The family speak out about the moments leading up to the point their son, Sebastian, vanished from his Tennessee bedroom
www.independent.co.uk
Sebastian Rogers’ mother reveals she heard ‘noise’ on night autistic teen disappeared
The mother of
missing teen
Sebastian Rogers said she heard “noise” coming from her teen son’s room on the night that he disappeared from his bedroom.
Sebastian, who has high-functioning autism, has been previously described by his
mother as being “very smart” and “not a mischievous child by any means”.
Leading up to his disappearance, his mother told the YouTube channel Chronicles of Olivia in an interview that their family was having a normal day, filled with laughter, eating a “colossal” amount of popcorn and a trip around town.
Her son took out the trash at the end of the driveway, as was his usual chore, and then around 9pm, he was told to go to bed.
“He was doing something in his room because about an hour later, I heard some noise, and I was like, ‘I don’t care what you’re doing in there, but go to sleep,”’ Katie Proudfoot, Mr Roger’s mother, recalled the channel.
“[At] six o’clock, I went to wake him up for school Monday morning, and that’s when he wasn’t there.”
Ms Proudfoot scanned the entire house, as she said it’s typical for him to get up and rummage for snacks or will dip behind the walls and playfully scare her.
“I didn’t see him in his room. I looked all over. I ran through the whole house. I looked out all the doors and windows, and I was like hollering his name,” she said.
“I jumped in my car, and I drove around the neighborhood, and I drove over by the school, and ... like, at this point, I was like hysterical, and I was crying, I was screaming.”
It was at that point that her husband phoned law enforcement, but “20 days later, we haven’t found him”.
His mother and stepfather described him as “not a child that wanders”, and is a very smart, functional, happy person; just a teenager who is coming into his hormones.
The couple were asked by Chronicles of Olivia about the home security footage obtained by WTVF that appears to show two flashlights outside the family’s home in the Hendersonville neighbourhood around 3.10am in the middle of the night when the teen went missing.
One clip shows a pitch-black Stafford Court neighbourhood with two lights that appear to be people with flashlights moving toward each other before moving off-screen.
However, Sebastian’s stepfather, Chris Proudfoot, told Chronicles of Olivia that “nothing that is being assumed right now is actually true about that video, unfortunately”.
He said that, as parents, they saw the footage first-hand from law enforcement.
“Everything that everybody is trying to assume is a flashlight, I hate to say this [but] it’s not, as much as we would love it to be one, it’s not,” Mr Proudfoot claimed.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said in a
recent update that “we do caution that some surveillance video being shared in the public may have been misinterpreted or misidentified, or not shown in its entirety”, but did not specify any particular videos.
“Much of the work currently being done to bring Sebastian home may not necessarily be public or visible,” the agency said.
‘But agents, detectives and intelligence analysts continue to work around the clock to review every bit of information available. Sebastian’s family has remained cooperative since the search began, and have done whatever law enforcement has asked of them.”
