An 18-year-old kid -- or anyone, for that matter -- can't just disappear, can't just walk out of a nightclub, find his way to the nearby hotel where he planned to spend the night and then just vanish outside the hotel's doors.
Yet that's precisely what appears to have happened to Sylvester "Sly" McCurry, a senior at Duluth East High School.
On Jan. 17, he and a buddy, Keegan Couillard, 18, a 2009 Central High School graduate, went to Superior's Stargate Nightclub, which was hosting an alcohol-free night. A security camera captured McCurry leaving the club about 11 p.m. Around midnight, Couillard tried calling McCurry's cell phone but got no answer. Assuming McCurry had been picked up by his girlfriend or had left with other friends, Couillard didn't try calling again until the next day. When he still wasn't able to reach McCurry then, and when McCurry's girlfriend and others said they didn't know his whereabouts, Keegan -- and, soon, the rest of the Northland -- knew something was horribly wrong.
In the weeks that have followed, police officers have conducted countless interviews, scoured phone records and searched the St. Louis River bay from the air. Joined by McCurry's friends, family and others, authorities have searched on foot near the club, around the waterfront and everywhere else imaginable. Police dogs have tracked McCurry's scent to the back door of the hotel, but that's where the scent ended.
And the rumors and worries began -- despite no evidence of foul play, accidental death, gang activity or of McCurry just deciding to up and hop in a car and head across country, as Superior Police Capt. Chad La Lor said.
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Not even a $50,000 reward has been able to generate a case-cracking clue.
With an 8 p.m. rally planned for tomorrow outside of Stargate -- a "March for Sly" -- McCurry's friends, family members and others are left with an unimaginable ache, with a hole, and with a desperate need for something they can't quite grasp.
Someone has to know something. McCurry has to be out there. Somewhere. He couldn't have just disappeared.
"He's waiting for us to find him," McCurry's mother, Tammy Carter, said.
And we're all waiting for someone to come forward, to do the right thing, to finally end the pain that comes from not knowing, to finally fill in the blanks.
