The Vanishing on Highway 25: A Year After Reuben Waithaka Disappeared in Alabama, His Kenyan Family Still Searches
Reuben Waithaka, 72, flew from Kenya to Alabama to watch his grandson cross a high school stage. He never made it home. A year on, the search has narrowed to a strip of woodland off Highway 25.
It is the petrol station on Highway 25 that the family keeps returning to. The footage is grainy and short — an elderly man in a blue and white plaid shirt and khaki trousers steps into the frame near the entrance, lingers for a moment, then drifts back out, in the direction of the trees. It is the last confirmed image of Reuben Waithaka, a 72-year-old grandfather from Kenya, before he walked off into the wooded edge of Calera, a small town in Shelby County, Alabama, and disappeared.
On 22 May 2026, the case crossed an unsettling threshold: one full year since anyone has been able to say for certain where he is.
A graduation, an ocean, and a small Alabama town
Mr Waithaka had not come to Alabama to settle. He had come for one specific reason, the kind of reason that pulls older Kenyan parents and grandparents thousands of miles from home each summer — a graduation. His grandson was finishing high school at Calera High, and the family wanted Mzee in the front row for the ceremony.
In May 2025 he made the long flight from Nairobi through one of the standard transit hubs and into the American South — a region that, for many first-time visitors, can feel disorienting in scale. Calera is not a big city. It is a community of roughly 18,000 people, threaded by Highway 25, where Shelby County's pine ridges give way to small subdivisions, hunting parcels, and stretches of road that look more or less identical from one mile to the next.
At some point on the morning of 15 May, around 11:30, Mr Waithaka was on foot near a petrol station along that highway. He had no wallet, no phone, no ID and no money on him, according to police. Surveillance cameras captured his movements briefly. Witnesses who came forward later said they had seen an older man matching his description crawl under a fence and walk onto a tract of hunting land behind the station. From that moment, his trail goes cold.
A search that has not ended
The Calera Police Department mounted what officers there describe as one of the most sustained searches in recent memory. K9 units worked the brush behind the station. Drones flew low passes over the canopy. Helicopters covered wider sweeps. For weeks, search teams pushed through woodland and undeveloped lots, calling his name into stands of pine that absorb sound the way thick paper absorbs ink.
Police Chief David Hyche has said publicly that the case is unlike most missing persons reports the department handles. Adults who disappear in Calera usually surface within hours or days. A year of nothing is, in his telling, almost without precedent.
The department's working theory hinges on a quiet possibility the family did not initially share widely: that Mr Waithaka may have been showing early signs of dementia. In an unfamiliar country, with no identification and no easy way to ask for help, an episode of disorientation in those woods could have ended in any number of ways, none of them good.
Detective Blake Littleton, who has led the investigation, says it remains open. Officers continue to chase leads and have looped in federal partners, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in case Mr Waithaka somehow drifted into a different system. Nothing has come back.
A reward, a foundation, and a Kenyan son's plea
The Calera Police Foundation, a civic body that backs the department's work, has put up a US$1,000 reward for information that helps locate him. Its president, Marc Jones, has framed the money less as a bounty and more as a way to honour a family whose pain has begun to feel permanent. A thousand dollars is not a fortune. But in a small Alabama town, it is enough to remind people that the case has not been forgotten.
Mr Waithaka's son, Willie Barua, has done the hardest work of any relative of a missing person. He has talked. He has asked, over and over, on social media and through community groups in both the United States and Kenya, for anyone who saw an older African man walking along Highway 25 last spring to please come forward. He has reminded people of the plaid shirt, the khaki trousers, the slight build, the gentle voice. He has reminded them that his father was the kind of grandfather who would cross an ocean just to clap for a grandson.
A wife back in Kenya, and the limits of a long-distance search
Elizabeth Waithaka, his wife, eventually flew home. There was nothing else to do in Alabama. The household in Kenya needed attention — bills, family duties, the slow management of a life that had not paused because hers had. She left behind a country where her husband's face had appeared on flyers, on a police bulletin and in a few local news segments, and returned to a community where his absence sat at the kitchen table.
For Kenyan diaspora families, the case has become a quiet study in what can go wrong when older relatives travel alone to the United States for family milestones. Many in the community now share, in WhatsApp groups and church halls, the small precautions that did not exist for Mr Waithaka in time: a card with the host's address sewn into a jacket pocket, an unlocked phone with emergency contacts on the lock-screen wallpaper, a written list of medications and conditions, and the simple discipline of never letting an older visitor wander unaccompanied, even at a familiar petrol station off a familiar highway.
A year on, and the questions that remain
The Calera Police Department says it is still receiving tips, though they have slowed considerably in recent months. Each one is logged and assessed. None so far has produced a body, a hospital admission record, an arrest, or a sighting that could be verified.
For now, the case lives in a difficult middle place. There has been no closure to grieve and no rescue to celebrate. Mr Waithaka is still listed as a missing person. His name still appears on the Shelby County alert systems. His grandson's diploma, the small piece of paper that occasioned the entire trip, hangs somewhere in a family home that is now also a memorial.
Anyone with information about Reuben Waithaka — last seen on Highway 25 in Calera, Alabama on 15 May 2025, wearing a blue and white plaid shirt and khaki trousers — is asked by the Calera Police Department to come forward, no matter how trivial the detail may seem. A year, the family's appeal makes clear, is too long to wait. It is also not too long to keep looking.
