The Plaid Shirt and the Hunting Land: A Kenyan Grandfather's Disappearance in Alabama Stretches Into a Second Year
Reuben Waithaka, 72, flew from Kenya for his grandson's graduation in Calera. One year later, his family is still asking who saw him last.
The petrol station on Highway 25 in Calera, Alabama, is the kind of place that does not invite stories. It sits beside a state road that bends through pine flats south of Birmingham, the sort of road where pickup trucks fuel up between farm errands and where surveillance cameras blink on the canopy without anyone paying much attention. Just before noon on 15 May 2025, one of those cameras recorded a 72-year-old Kenyan man named Reuben Waithaka stepping out of the frame for what would turn out to be the last verified time anyone has seen him.
That afternoon, his grandson was supposed to walk across a stage. Calera High School was holding its commencement, and Mr Waithaka had flown all the way from Kenya to be in the audience. He never made it to the ceremony. By evening the family was on the phone with police. By the following morning, a quiet stretch of Shelby County woodland had become the centre of a search that would still be running, by every meaningful measure, a full year later.
This week, as the anniversary of his disappearance passed, Mr Waithaka's family in the United States and in Kenya appealed once more for information, sightings, anything. The Calera Police Department, which has never closed the case, says it is still working leads. The Calera Police Foundation has put up a $1,000 reward. There has been no confirmed sighting since the day he vanished.
A Petrol Station on Highway 25
According to the police account, Mr Waithaka was last seen at around 11.30 am on the day of the graduation, walking into a service station along Highway 25. He was wearing a blue and white plaid shirt and khaki trousers, the kind of unflashy outfit that a Kenyan elder might pack for a trip to a small American town. He had no wallet on him. He had no money. He had no identification.
Surveillance footage caught his movements in the minutes before he disappeared. After leaving the station, witnesses later told officers they had seen an older man matching his description crawl under a wire fence at the edge of the property and walk off onto neighbouring land, much of it hunting acreage thick with pine and undergrowth. From there, the trail goes cold. He did not return to his son's house. He did not call. He did not show up at the high school.
Calera's Police Chief, David Hyche, has said publicly that this is not how these cases usually go. Missing-person reports involving elderly visitors are typically resolved within hours, sometimes by a passing motorist, sometimes by a hospital phoning around when an unidentified patient walks in. With Mr Waithaka there has been none of that.
The Boy Who Was Graduating
For the family, the wound is doubled by the occasion that brought him to Alabama in the first place. Mr Waithaka had crossed two continents specifically so he could see his grandson graduate. Diaspora families know what those journeys cost: the ticket bought months in advance, the visa interview scheduled and rescheduled, the relatives in the village asked to look after the homestead while the grandparent is away.
When the graduation finally happened, his seat was empty. The ceremony went ahead anyway, because what else was there to do. His son, Willie Barua, has spent the months since then giving interviews, posting flyers and asking, sometimes through tears, for the public to come forward with any detail at all. Mr Waithaka's wife, Elizabeth, eventually flew back to Kenya to manage matters at home, including the kind of practical questions that no family wants to answer in the absence of a body or a verdict: who looks after what, who signs what, when does waiting become something else.
Drones, K9s and the Question of Dementia
The Calera Police Department has not been idle. Officers have searched the woodland behind the petrol station with K9 units. They have brought in drones. A helicopter has crossed the canopy more than once. Detective Blake Littleton, who is still assigned to the case, says investigators continue to follow leads and have co-ordinated with federal agencies, including United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in case Mr Waithaka turned up in any system anywhere in the country.
So far, none of it has produced a result. One of the leading theories Chief Hyche has floated is that Mr Waithaka may have been suffering from undiagnosed or unmentioned dementia, and that the unfamiliar Alabama landscape, on a hot May morning, may have left him disoriented in a way that an elder in his own home village would never have been. It is the kind of theory that explains the fence-crawling and the walk into the woods. It does not explain how a year of searching the same woods has turned up nothing.
The Calera Police Foundation, a civilian body that supports the department, has offered a $1,000 reward for any information that materially advances the investigation. Foundation president Marc Jones has framed the reward as much about the family's search for answers as about an arrest or a recovery.
A Diaspora That Knows This Feeling
For Kenyans abroad, particularly in the United States, the Waithaka case rests inside a familiar and uncomfortable category. Every few months brings news of an elder relative who travels to attend a graduation, a wedding or the birth of a grandchild and then runs into trouble that the family back home struggles to comprehend at distance. In just the past several weeks, Kenyan diaspora outlets have reported the recovery of a body in Oregon, a death during surgery in Sweden, and a separate missing-person case in Bethany, Oregon. Each story carries the same quiet question: how does a country that asked our parents to come and visit also lose them so completely?
There is no statistic that captures this. The United States Department of Justice does not break missing-person data down by national origin, and the Kenyan State Department for Diaspora Affairs has limited reach inside individual American municipalities. What does exist is a network of churches, WhatsApp groups and community organisations that pass the flyers from city to city, and that this week have once again pinned Mr Waithaka's photograph to the top of their feeds.
What the Family Is Asking For
The family's ask is narrow and concrete. They want anyone in the Calera area who saw an older man in a plaid shirt last May, or any time since, to call the Calera Police Department. They want hunters who walked the land behind Highway 25 in the days and weeks after 15 May 2025 to think back. They want the federal agencies that touch immigration and missing-person databases to keep his details active. And they want, in the quiet hours of the night, the simple human thing of knowing.
A year on, none of that has been given to them. The Calera Police Foundation's phone line is still open. The reward is still posted. And the petrol station on Highway 25, the last verified place where Reuben Waithaka was seen, is still selling coffee and fuel as if nothing happened there at all.
