November 22, 2022

Who would have thought that an Ohio State University med student going to a bar one night would vanish without a trace?

Last year I really enjoyed writing about true crime stories in this column. I find it very interesting that crime can happen anywhere and to anyone. People often say, “That’s so sad, but it would never happen to me,” but that isn’t always the case. True crime doesn’t affect only one group of people—rich, poor, black, white, old or young. Anyone can be a victim.

I asked one of my favorite teachers (shoutout to Ms. Telari, Copley High’s forensics teacher), who shares my love for true crime, for a case I should write about. I thought she would give me an infamous story from a notable location somewhere in the world—but she responded with one local to Ohio. Nonetheless, this case exceeded my expectations.

It is a very early spring morning in 2006 —1:15 a.m. to be exact—in Columbus, and Brian Shaffer and his friends are going bar hopping. Shaffer, a second-year med student and Pearl Jam music fan, had a beautiful future planned. He was studying at The Ohio State University and had a girlfriend. Surveillance video showed Shaffer and two friends entering the Ugly Tuna Saloona bar. Roughly forty-five minutes later, surveillance video shows that Brian came back outside and talked to two women in their twenties. Right after, the camera caught him walking back towards the bar entrance, but no one saw him beyond that. After failing to answer many calls during the weekend and not boarding his scheduled flight on Monday morning (a spring break trip with his girlfriend), he was then designated as a missing person. He was never to be seen or heard from again.

Many people believed that he went out of the bar’s back door, but that led to a chaotic construction site that would have been difficult to walk around, especially if he was under the influence of alcohol. Some suspect the camera just missed him, or he changed his clothing after going inside. Both are possible, but neither are plausible. The family believed he had no reason to purposefully disappear.

So what happened to Brian? Did he go back into the bar? Was he killed? Did someone take him? Did he leave out the back door? What did he say to those two girls right before his disappearance?

This was the case of Brian Shaffer: the bright young man who vanished when his life had just begun.