A year after La Vista boy’s disappearance, mother holds onto hope her son is alive

Every night before he goes to bed, 6-year-old Gabriel Handlos sits with his mother in their Omaha living room and prays.

For his family and friends. And for a boy he has never met named Ryan Larsen.

Ryan, who was 11 at the time, vanished after apparently running away from his La Vista elementary school a year ago Tuesday.

“We saw the news about him missing, and it just sounded so sad,” said Gabriel’s mother, Monica Mora-Handlos. “Nobody wants their child to go to school and then have them not come home. We thought what we could do is pray for him every night.”

But despite those prayers, extensive searches and an investigation that remains active, authorities know no more about Ryan’s whereabouts than they did a year ago, when they think he was last spotted outside his La Vista apartment complex less than two hours after he slipped away from school.

Tips in the case have dwindled, La Vista Police Chief Bob Lausten said.

The searches of neighborhoods, business districts, lakes, sewers and drainage ditches — involving more than 100 law enforcement officers, divers, dogs, a helicopter and hundreds of volunteers — have long since ceased.

Even today, authorities have no theory they can share of how and why he went missing.

“From an actual boots-on-the-ground, dog-sniffing things, it absolutely has cooled off a bit,” Lausten said.

Yet the case hasn’t gone cold, he said. The police department is putting together a subpoena for electronic records to gain “another level of information.” Lausten declined to elaborate so as to not jeopardize the case.

These days, Lausten said he thinks Ryan was taken by someone he knew. He points to Ryan’s size — 5-foot-8 — and his tendency to get agitated. Ryan, who is autistic, would have reacted strongly to any stranger who picked him up, the chief said, and that person would have promptly pulled over and let him out.

“From what we know,” Lausten said, “he wouldn’t have gone without a fight.”

Lausten said he thinks someone still has information that could lead to an answer.

“Not everybody has been completely forthcoming with us,” he said. “We have some people who … could shed some light on what happened … Somebody knows where he is and they need to tell us.”

Ryan’s case is unusual for how long his whereabouts have remained a mystery.

Nearly all missing autistic children are found, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Of the 1,516 children on the autism spectrum reported to the center as missing during the years 2011 to 2020, 98% were found. Most were discovered within the first week and all but 4% were found alive.

Ryan brings to mind the similarly baffling disappearance of a 19-year-old Omahan Jason Jolkowski, who vanished in the spring of 2001 while walking near Benson High School. While their son has never been found, the Jolkowskis successfully worked to get Nebraska to establish a clearinghouse and hotline for missing people.

In Ryan’s case, an eyewitness reportedly spotted him near his home — at the moment when his mother and seven to 10 La Vista officers were searching the area. How he remained unseen by them at that time, and later as the searches grew and intensified, is a big part of the mystery.

And while the case may have faded in memory for some, it continues to tug at the hearts of others.

“One thing I still can’t believe, he just walked out of school and we don’t know what happened,” Handlos said. “It hurts my momma heart. If it was my child, I wouldn’t want people to forget him.”

Super sweet. Super helpful. A big imagination. A bigger heart.

That is how Tammi Larsen describes her youngest child and only son. Ryan was the last of her four children still at home. Her youngest daughter had just graduated from high school and moved to a community two hours away. Her two older daughters also were grown and starting their own families. His father had never been part of his life.

Tammi Larsen said Ryan was always looking for ways to help. For example, if the carts were a mess in a grocery store parking lot, he would arrange them and put them together.

Ryan’s reward for doing well at school? Being allowed to help the janitor.

“He would get to help the janitor do different projects,” his mother said. “Take out the trash, go help in the lunchroom, picking up stuff. That was the reward he chose — to help the janitor.”

He was creative and liked building things with Legos, cardboard and tape, Larsen said.

“He is the kindest little boy,” said Christy Latham, the oldest of Ryan’s three sisters.

Ryan’s autism affected the way he communicated and interacted with others. It made him prone to anxiety and, when stressed — as his mother believes he was on the day he disappeared — he coped by walking away. He also has Tourette syndrome — a condition of the nervous system — and epilepsy, so he was on a range of medications.

His sister, Taylor Larsen, wrote on Facebook soon after her brother’s disappearance that his autism made him who he is.

“At first he is shy, but once you get to know him, he won’t stop talking. The media is saying he suffers from autism, but I think that is what makes him who he is,” she wrote. “I envy him for being able to ignore what other people think … He is ambitious and has overcome great things … Ryan is deeply loved by our family and friends.”

Latham still remembers the first time she saw her infant brother: “Two little blue eyes peeking out of a pile of blankets. He is the baby of the family.

“Who would ever want to hurt him is beyond me.”

Autistic children are prone to running off.

Almost half — 49% — of parents with an autistic child over the age of 4 said their child had wandered off, according to a 2018 study in the journal Pediatrics.

Sometimes, the child took off because he or she was laser-focused on an objective. Other times, it was a way of handling stress.

Ryan had run off multiple times before May 17.

“It wasn’t the first time he’d left school, it wasn’t the first time he’s wandered off,” his mother said. “The police around here have gotten to know him quite well the last two years. They’ve had to come and find him and bring him home.”

Ryan likes the police, his mother said.

One Christmas, he made ornaments for them. Another time, he did chores to raise money to buy the department wooden police flags. During the summer, he took officers cases of water.

One of his birthday gifts during COVID was a pack of La Vista police officer trading cards. They still hang on his bedroom wall, his mother said.

Lausten said the fact that officers had gotten to know Ryan made his disappearance all the more difficult.

“When you have a connection with somebody, it tends to personalize it,” he said.

Ryan’s mother said some members of the public misunderstood Ryan’s situation, which led to mean social media comments.

“That was one of the other misconceptions: ‘Why was his mother letting him run off?’” Larsen said. “We didn’t let him run around outside unattended. If he got triggered by something, he’d take off.

“I never left any of my kids outside to play, there is nowhere around here to play safely,” she said of their apartment complex near 84th and Harrison Streets.

Tammi Larsen is convinced her son is alive and she sees hope in the fact that her son hasn’t been found.

“I tell the girls every day that: ‘Every day we don’t get that phone call is one more chance we have of getting him back.’ I still believe he’s out there somewhere. We just have to find him.”

Like many other children with autism, Ryan had been enrolled in Project Lifesaver, which equips individuals who have cognitive limitations with a GPS tracking bracelet and trains local authorities in searching for people.

Ryan had been in the program about two years when he developed a habit of cutting off the plastic wristband, which he didn’t like. This led his mother and the police officer who worked most closely with Ryan to agree that it didn’t make sense to keep putting it on him.

As a result, on the day he disappeared, he wasn’t wearing one.

May 17 started out as a good day, his mother said.

“He was actually very happy,” Tammi Larsen said. “One of the things we’d been working on was him getting dressed by himself, and it was a pretty successful morning. I dropped him off (at school) and everything seemed to be OK.”

It was a Monday. The Omaha area was in the midst of a wet spell, so Larsen grabbed an umbrella for Ryan as they left their apartment.

The umbrella later would be the only physical evidence that appears to place Ryan back at the family’s apartment building after he left his grade school.

A sixth grader, Ryan attended La Vista West Elementary School, the same school his mother had attended as a little girl. The school was about a five-minute walk from the apartment where he and his mother lived, and about a 10-minute walk from his grandmother’s home.

Officials with the Papillion La Vista Community Schools have declined to talk about what happened because of a possible lawsuit by the Larsen family.

Tammi Larsen provided the following account of what she said she has been told about that day at school:

Ryan had been struggling with a math problem that morning and had gotten frustrated to the point that he needed to be alone to settle down.

In accordance with the individual educational program his mother and the school had agreed to, Ryan went to a separate room to be by himself but under the supervision of an adult. That adult stayed with him until needing to leave. The adult’s replacement was late, and it was during this unsupervised time that Ryan left.

Ryan’s mother said she has been told he was discovered missing from that room between 11:45 a.m. and 11:55 a.m.

Lausten said police records indicate Ryan last was seen between 11:55 a.m. and 12:05 p.m. as he walked past the elementary school office with his umbrella. As he did so, the school secretary called out to Ryan to say that she would hold his umbrella for him, Lausten said. But Ryan kept walking, he said.

According to the time stamp on Larsen’s voice mail, she said she was notified by the school at 12:27 p.m. that her son was missing.

According to Lausten, the school called 911 to report him missing at about 12:29 p.m. and police arrived there at 12:32 p.m.

Larsen was at her job at a day care in Papillion. When she felt her phone buzz in her pocket, she said, she checked the voicemail immediately. She estimates she was out the door by 12:35.

La Vista, with a population of about 17,000 people, has a police force of 40.

On any given day, five officers are patrolling the city. When a child goes missing, the department activates those five, plus command officers, detectives and anyone else available, Lausten said. When police were notified Ryan was missing, the department sent 10 officers out to search for him.

Among other areas, they searched around the school, his apartment complex and in a treed area near La Vista Keno & Sports Grill, where he sometimes went when he walked away from home. La Vista Keno is across the street from his apartment building.

Meanwhile, Tammi Larsen hurried home. She checked around the apartment complex and garage. Police already were there when she arrived, she said.

Her son couldn’t have gotten inside the apartment, his mother said, because he didn’t have a key. She said he didn’t have a key because he wasn’t allowed to walk home after school — each day, a van picked him up and took him to her workplace. Nor did he have a cellphone.

In the past when Ryan had run off, she said, he usually reappeared within about an hour.

“The farthest Ryan has ever gone (from school) was to my mom’s house, maybe a 10-minute walk,” she said. He had done that a few weeks before his May 17 disappearance, leaving school and going to his grandmother’s house.

Looking back, Larsen wishes that Ryan’s school had notified her as soon as he was discovered missing.

“I realize they had to look through the school to see if he had left,” she said. “But knowing he’d done this a few weeks prior, they should have watched him better. When they realized he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, they should have been calling me at the same time they were looking for him.”

If the timeline provided by police is correct, Ryan would have been outside his apartment — in the heart of La Vista — during the time of the active search.

In the short walk from his school to his home, Ryan might have passed a fire station and the La Vista Community Center. Not far away is a tire store, barber shop, diner, Christian bookstore and fast-food restaurants.

Surveillance video from La Vista Keno & Sports Bar, which is across the street from the Southfield Apartments, shows a figure police say they think is Ryan going from light pole to light pole. This would have been at 1:30 p.m., Lausten said. In other words, an hour into the search.

Lausten said an officer in a cruiser was in the area at that time.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Lausten said, that the officer didn’t see Ryan.

La Vista police sent the video to Omaha police, the FBI and Secret Service for enhancement. None of those enhancements provided a definitive answer.

“We couldn’t positively identify it as Ryan, but we are reasonably certain that it is,” Lausten said.

A resident of the apartment complex told police he saw Ryan about 1:45 p.m. by a dumpster at the apartment complex and that Ryan had an umbrella.

Ryan’s mother is unconvinced that either the video or eyewitness sighting was Ryan. The resident of the apartment complex didn’t know Ryan, she said.

Lausten said it wouldn’t be unusual for Larsen to doubt a witness she hadn’t met. But he thinks the report is credible.

“We have a live witness, so we’re pretty confident in his statement,” Lausten said. “We’ve never positively said it’s him, but we have a strong belief it is.”

Four days after Ryan disappeared, a special needs couple who live in the area brought Ryan’s umbrella to the police station, Lausten said. The couple told police they hadn’t realized the umbrella was Ryan’s.

No other evidence has emerged about Ryan’s whereabouts.

About 6 p.m. on the day Ryan disappeared, La Vista Police put out a mutual-aid call for help. About 40 officers from around the metro area responded. They set up a command post and intensified their search, working until about 2 a.m.

The next day, more help arrived. More than 100 officers searched and more than 200 people from the community assisted, according to Detective Greg Carrico of the La Vista Police Department. Carrico is the lead detective on the case.

La Vista police also called the FBI, reviewed the videos Ryan watched, and interviewed family members and school staff, Lausten said.

Lausten and Larsen said a misunderstanding early in the investigation led to the mistaken belief that Ryan might have viewed videos on how to hide from police. There’s no evidence of that, Lausten said.

Because autistic children sometimes are drawn to water, police sent divers into a pond at the old La Vista golf course and the lake at Walnut Creek Recreation Area. They walked the Thompson Creek and other drainage ways.

While Walnut Creek lake would be a 6.5-mile walk from where Ryan disappeared, it is a place the family had visited and is near where his mother worked at the time. Searchers spent significant time at the lake because search dogs trained to detect dead bodies had picked up a scent there.

Lausten said the lake was lowered as much as practical last year. This year, the water is clearer, so police will revisit the lake this week with an underwater drone, he said.

Authorities knocked on doors and talked with every resident at the apartment complex and between Ryan’s home and school.

Police also searched the dumpsters at the apartment complex and nearby keno parlor. They also viewed video from the transfer station where the dumpsters’ trash was taken. Trash trucks have cameras on the back that record the trash being emptied from the truck onto a transfer pad, Lausten said. There, it is bulldozed into waiting semitrailer trucks for the trip to landfills in Douglas County, Nebraska, and Mills County, Iowa.

“We have the video, and we didn’t see any body,” he said.

Several hundred sex offenders live in the region, Lausten said, and the department focused on those whose victims had been children. After interviewing several, he said, they were ruled out.

When police attempted to review video from nearby businesses, all but two cooperated immediately, Lausten said. Those two eventually turned over video, but one fumbled the request and provided it for the wrong day. By the time the mistake was discovered, the business had deleted the May 17 footage.

No one was immune from the search, Lausten said. Police searched the La Vista home of Ryan’s grandmother. They searched his mother’s apartment and her car. But they found nothing.

Authorities also traveled out of state to pursue leads or interview people related to Ryan’s family — to places like Colorado, Minnesota, North Dakota and Nevada.

Ryan’s mother thinks it’s most likely that a stranger took her son. However, she acknowledged her son may have been taken by someone he knew but she didn’t know.

On a normal day, she said, Ryan would have refused to get into a car with a stranger. But May 17 was not a normal day for Ryan. Her son would have been highly agitated as he wandered La Vista.

“He was already upset — upset enough to leave school,” she said. “He knows his police buddies would be calling and looking for him; he knows his mom would be looking for him, it’s raining and he doesn’t like rain.

“His anxiety level was probably so high that if somebody pulled up and said, “Get in, I’ll help you” … I think he absolutely would have hopped in the car. He probably would have realized very quickly, ‘Oh no, what did I do?’”

No special reward has been set up. A standard Crime Stoppers reward of up to $2,500 is available to anyone providing a tip that leads to the discovery of Ryan.

“With most missing kids, you find them within a couple of hours,” Carrico said. “As the case evolved and grew bigger, we were just inundated with information, possible sightings, from kids who saw him that day, teachers who saw him, people who knew him, all the way to psychics and other people offering their services.”

The tips didn’t pan out.

Someone found a jacket in a nearby vacant house. It wasn’t Ryan’s.

A teacher searching for Ryan encountered some men at a vacant apartment. They didn’t speak English, and that led to confusion. The teacher’s suspicions turned out to be a false lead. The men were workers.

A man with a divining rod near 92nd Street and Mockingbird Drive said he thought Ryan was in a nearby culvert. Lausten and another officer went down a steep embankment to check. Ryan wasn’t there.

La Vista police have made changes in procedures, as has the Papillion La Vista Community Schools.

Lausten said police have created the Take Me Home program, in which people provide police information about their special needs family members. The information will include answers to such questions as, “Where do they like to go?” “Are they afraid of police, lights and sirens?”

The goal is to get a jump on a search, he said.

The school district is installing cameras at all 16 elementary schools, spokeswoman Annette Eyman said. Cameras will be placed at all entrances and exits and key common areas such as gyms, hallways and lunchrooms. Most of the $610,000 cost will come from federal COVID relief funds.

Middle and high schools already have cameras.

The district also is instituting new procedures on how to track children who have a tendency to walk off, Eyman said.

Ryan’s disappearance is still an open wound at the school, she said. Teachers will wear green ribbons today, and a counselor will be available to talk with students or staff.

“It’s hard,” Eyman said. “Not a day goes by when the staff at La Vista West is not thinking about Ryan. This one-year mark just compounds those emotions since the day he left.”

Ryan’s mother said the family “is doing the best we can.”

Hateful comments on social media have made it harder, she said. People have hounded the family, even to the point of going through their trash. Someone tried to scam the family, sending them a photo of Ryan and saying they had him in Africa. All the family needed to do was send money.

“In the beginning, it was very hard to explain to my girls how people could say such cruel things,” she said. “It’s been very hard on us, but we’ve also pulled together to help each other and keep moving forward.”

At the direction of police, the family avoided a high public profile after Ryan disappeared.

“We were instructed by police to stay out of the media spotlight,” Larsen said. “And we didn’t want the spotlight on us. We wanted it to be on finding Ryan.”

Overall, the good from people has counteracted the bad.

“Hundreds of people all over the place were out looking for him,” she said. “As much as we were getting cruel comments, we were also getting messages from people like, ‘You don’t know me, but how can we help?’ ‘Do you need anything?’”

Help came from all over. Theresa Rivera, a Los Angeles mother of an autistic child who also ran away from class, heard about Ryan’s disappearance on social media. She called two companies in Omaha, Lamar Advertising Co. and Best Buy Signs, to enlist their help in publicizing his case, leading to a billboard along Interstate 80 and two bus benches.

“It broke my heart that Ryan hadn’t been found,” Rivera said. “He’s just a little boy. He’s out there somewhere.”

Last May, a little more than a week after Ryan disappeared, about 200 people gathered at La Vista’s Central Park to show their support for finding him.

And then, about two weeks later, people gathered again to observe Ryan’s 12th birthday. The family has saved the cards and presents they were given.

“They are up in his room,” his mother said. “When he comes home, I can show him all of them. ‘All of these people were looking for you and wanting you to come home.’ He’ll be able to see that.”

Larsen said coming to grips with her son’s disappearance has taken time. It has been an adjustment coming home to an empty apartment.

“For me, for a while, I didn’t want to move forward, I didn’t want to move on,” she said. “Then it was explained: I’m not moving on without him, I’m moving forward for him, because he’s going to need us when he gets back home.”