More than a year has passed since Brennan Wakey dropped his father Wayne off at his home on Dewitt Street in Port Charlotte during the late-night hours of an otherwise mundane overcast night. Family spread across the U.S. and Philippines have been searching for Wayne Wakey since.
The only clues, according to the family: a bullet hole found in the floor of his bedroom, a power saw with suspicious red coloring, and missing guns and jewelry.
Family members fear there could be several reasons for his disappearance, including money he owed to a drug dealer or his struggles with mental health and drug addiction overcame him.
One thing is certain: Sometime between May 19 and June 1, 2023, the 53-year-old seemingly disappeared into thin air. Somewhere within those 13 days lie answers that have yet to be revealed.
Where is Wayne Wakey?
His family is still trying to make sense of his disappearance, frustrated by what they consider to be lackluster attempts by the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office at solving his case. The family believes law enforcement is too focused on Wayne Wakey’s son, who is accused of murder in an unrelated case.
A five-page report by the Charlotte Sheriff's Office obtained by the Herald-Tribune detailing the first three months of the investigation doesn’t provide insight into where the man might be, whether he’s alive, or where the investigation stands.
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The case remains an open investigation, according to a Charlotte Sheriff’s Office spokesman Chris Hall.
Wayne Wakey’s older brother, Mark Wakey, has been trying to get answers from his home in Washington state. He said deputies on the case are not doing “their damn jobs.”
He’s adamant his brother wouldn’t have gone off to chase an “endless summer” without telling his family and leaving behind his van, which was still at the home when he was reported missing.
“It’s not in Wayne’s nature to be a quiet person,” Mark Wakey said. “What I mean by that is, usually, if you went to a bar and stuff like that, he had an entourage. He was always boisterous and loud.”
He’s also certain that his nephew and Wayne's youngest son, Brennan Wakey, who is facing charges for second-degree murder and tampering with physical evidence in an unrelated Sarasota County case, doesn’t have anything to do with his dad’s disappearance.
Sarasota case inches through legal system
Brennan Wakey was arrested in December 2021 after shooting Colton Wright, who had been in a romantic relationship with Brennan Wakey since June 2021. Sarasota police found Wright lying on the floor with gunshot wounds in a room of the Hyatt Place Hotel off University Parkway after housekeeping discovered his body on Dec. 9, 2021.
Hotel surveillance captured Brennan Wakey exiting the hotel via a side exit during the late hours, pulling a black duffle bag on wheels and a gun tucked into his waistband, according to a probable cause affidavit.
That gun, which was presumably used to shoot Wright, hasn’t been found, said Assistant State Attorney Karen Fraivillig, the lead prosecutor on the case. Fraivillig said the Charlotte Sheriff's Office alerted her that Wayne Wakey was missing because of their knowledge of the pending Sarasota case and because Brennan Wakey had fled to his father’s house following the shooting. Investigators found the victim’s laptop and phone at the house, Fraivillig said.
Since his arrest, Brennan Wakey claims he fired the handgun in self-defense to protect himself from Wright, who appeared to be under the influence and was swinging a bottle of margarita mix at him, he said.
In February, Brennan Wakey, along with his attorneys Liane McCurry and Jason Chapman, appeared in court for a “Stand Your Ground” hearing. The hearing, which stretched for two days in February, was postponed a third time on June 21 after Sarasota Circuit Court Judge Thomas Krug abruptly canceled the hearing less than 30 minutes after it started.
Days later, Krug denied the state's motion to increase Wakey's bond to $500,000, but not before the defense indicated its intention to file a motion to have Fraivillig recuse herself as the prosecutor on the case, alleging there was prosecutorial misconduct.
When asked, Chapman said he didn't believe the prosecution would implicate his client in his father’s disappearance based on a motion filed by the state.
The motion, filed in April, asked the judge to increase Brennan Wakey’s bond as he no longer has community ties. While the motion hints Wayne Wakey’s disappearance happened “under unexplained circumstances” and he was last seen with his son, it doesn’t claim Brennan Wakey had any involvement in his father’s disappearance.
Amy Thompson, the mother of the victim, has her suspicions about Brennan Wakey and Wayne Wakey’s disappearance. She told a Herald-Tribune reporter Wright was terrified of both Brennan Wakey’s dad and uncle.
“I just keep waiting for Brennan (Wakey) to slip up and do something else because … at this point, I honestly really wonder what has happened to his father, if he's done something to his father, if his father is out there, if his father is in my area, you know,” Thompson said.
Brennan Wakey, who agreed to speak with the Herald-Tribune about the disappearance, said he believes his father’s case is being treated unfairly, noting that if his father was wealthy or had political connections or if he was “a cute little blonde girl” there would be more effort in finding him.
“They’ve just written it off and that’s pretty much the end of it,” Brennan Wakey said.
Charlotte County investigators remain tight-lipped
Wayne Wakey is listed as a missing person by the Charlotte Sheriff’s Office, and his name appeared on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System two weeks after the agency began investigating. It’s unclear if investigators believe foul play was involved in his disappearance.
Reports indicate investigators searched through Wayne Wakey’s home, and the sheriff's Marine Unit and Dive team dredged a small canal behind the home in June 2023 after cadaver dogs alerted at the canal. No human remains were found, the report states.
“After discussing with our leadership in the Major Case Unit, I have been advised that we are unable to discuss any other details right now as the case remains open,” Charlotte Sheriff's Office spokesman Hall said in response to an email from the Herald-Tribune.
While Hall did speak several times with a Herald-Tribune reporter on the phone about the case, he did not divulge many details about the investigation beyond confirming the date Wayne Wakey went missing, that the case is still open, and that the Charlotte County community is a big help when it comes to solving missing persons cases.
Wakey family believes investigation into disappearance flawed
For more than a year, Wayne Wakey’s picture has stared out beneath the number assigned to him on NamUS, the national centralized database which, stores information related to missing, unidentified and unclaimed person cases across the U.S.
He’s become one of the 600,000 individuals reported missing annually in the U.S., although that number could be higher according to media reports since there is no federal law that requires agencies to submit missing persons cases to the database. As of June 26, there were 2,416 people listed as missing in Florida, including eight in Charlotte County, 13 in Sarasota County and 31 in Manatee County.
A week before Wayne Wakey disappeared, the governor approved revisions to Florida’s Statute on missing persons to include language that within two hours of a credible missing persons report being filed, agencies must transmit the report to the Florida Crime Information Center, the National Crime Information Center and NamUs databases.
The changes did not go into effect until after Wayne Wakey’s disappearance.
In June 2023, the Sheriff's Office dispatched a deputy to Wayne Wakey’s home for a well-being check after family and friends hadn’t heard from him with calls, texts and visits to his home yielding no answers. When a deputy arrived at Dewitt Street, he observed a white van in the driveway and all the doors were locked, according to the supplemental report. The deputy entered the home through an unsecured garage door. Wayne Wakey wasn’t there.
The supplemental report indicates investigators spoke with at least nine people during the first few months of the investigation. Of those, they spoke with Brennan Wakey on at least three occasions, including at their District 3 Office.
Mark Wakey expressed his frustration at law enforcement seemingly only focusing on his nephew as a main suspect, adding that investigators questioned him in an interrogation room. Yet, when it came to the list of people he’d given to law enforcement, people who were allegedly known drug users, investigators only spoke to them by phone, Mark Wakey said.
“The boy’s got a (expletive) ankle monitor on,” Mark Wakey said. “It tracks and records his entire movements. Nobody bothers to take a look at that, check the history of that. … He can’t go into Charlotte County from Sarasota County without asking permission.”
Court records indicate Brennan Wakey has been on supervised release since March 7, 2022, and as a condition of his release, he must wear an ankle monitor. In Sarasota County, Home Arrest Services Inc. is the sole company in charge of providing monitors to defendants who are out on bond and offer three different types of options including GPS tracking.
Pretrial services paperwork states that as part of his release, Brennan Wakey must notify if he leaves the county overnight. His defense attorney confirmed that the ankle monitor is GPS-tracked and there are safeguards in place to keep it from being taken off.
Darcy Roe has been trying to help her cousin get answers about his brother’s case. While Roe also lives out of state in Arkansas, Mark Wakey enlisted Roe’s help since the time difference between Arkansas and Florida is only an hour compared to the three-hour difference to Washington state.
Roe said every time she called the Sheriff's Office, she would either be told there was nothing else to report to the family on the investigation or that they couldn’t give her any information because she wasn’t Wayne Wakey’s immediate family.
She was also shocked when she learned that deputies hadn’t reached out to the Florida Highway Patrol to be on the lookout for her missing cousin just in case.
Addiction, mental health: possible reasons behind Wayne Wakey’s disappearance
In the first few days after May 19, Brennan Wakey didn’t find it too unusual that his father wasn’t returning calls or texts.
Wayne Wakey, who struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism according to his family, would sometimes go on binges and self-isolate inside his home, Brennan Wakey said.
In the months leading up to his disappearance, Wayne Wakey appeared to struggle with his mother’s death in March 2022 due to complications from diabetes and dementia. For three months, Wayne Wakey lived with his son as it was difficult for him to live in the Port Charlotte home where his mother used to reside, Brennan Wakey said.
Then came a downward spiral. Brennan Wakey told investigators his father became depressed and started saying he had “outlived his usefulness,” according to the CCSO supplemental narrative.
At the same time, he told family and friends he had cancer, and had Brennan Wakey sign power-of-attorney paperwork, Brennan Wakey said. He added he later learned his father hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer and theorized his father may have made up the diagnosis to get back together with his long-time on-again-off-again girlfriend in Pennsylvania.
It had been one of the reasons his father had wanted to return to the Dewitt Street property, Brennan Wakey said. His father had planned to renovate the home so he could sell it and move either to Pennsylvania or to a property in Idaho.
In his last journal entry dated a week before his disappearance, Wayne Wakey wrote he’d failed his girlfriend. He was seemingly saying goodbye. Brennan Wakey said he’d found the journal and gave it to law enforcement.
Mark Wakey suspects there was foul play related to drugs.
The 56-year-old said his brother had warned that if anything should happen to him, his drug dealer should be paid first. In the supplemental investigative narrative, Brennan Wakey also told law enforcement that his father mentioned he owed his drug dealer money.
Mark Wakey alleges that during a walkthrough of his brother’s house with detectives, his nephew noticed that there was a bullet hole in the floor, and there were trace amounts of blood. Brennan Wakey confirmed he’d seen a bullet hole, noting that an investigator hadn’t seemed interested when he pointed it out and that he had to urge for a photo to be taken. Brennan Wakey also added there was a pole saw inside his father’s locked bedroom with what appeared to be red coloring on the blade.
Further fueling Mark Wakey’s suspicion that something foul happened is the fact that items were allegedly missing from his brother’s home, including an extensive MAGA hat collection, an estimated 20 to 25 firearms, and his mother’s jewelry which she'd been collecting for years.
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As months ticked by, the Dewitt Street property sat partially demolished from the renovations Wayne Wakey had started. His bills piled up, too.
As the sheriff's investigation trailed off, Brennan Wakey was faced with an obstacle: creditors were coming for his father’s property.
Brennan Wakey said he learned that there was a tax certificate, judgment liens and utility liens against the house. His father also had credit card debt that would need to be paid, Brennan Wakey said. Unable to do the renovations himself, Brennan Wakey sold his father’s home.
The house, which was bought by Wayne Wakey’s mother in 2009 for $63,000, was sold in October for $170,000, according to property records.
Asked about the sale of the property, Brennan Wakey said he placed the money in an irrevocable trust for his father. He said that beyond using some of the money from the sale to pay for storage and to settle some of his father’s affairs, and barring any emergencies, the money will wait until the Wakey family can figure out what’s going on.
Brother seeks closure despite belief that missing man could be dead
As the age-old adage goes, the first 48 hours are critical in solving investigative cases. Hall said time is critical in missing persons' cases, emphasizing that the sooner law enforcement is notified, the sooner they can begin to validate tips.
“We keep hope alive,” Hall said about finding missing persons, especially when plenty of loved ones contact the agency for updates.
Law enforcement urges anyone with any information or tips about Wayne Wakey to contact the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office at (941) 639-2101, send a message through Facebook, or submit a tip via the department’s free mobile app.
Brennan Wakey said he reached out to detectives in January, but there weren’t any updates and it appeared law enforcement wasn’t actively working on the case because they’d exhausted all leads.
Mark Wakey doesn’t have hope that his brother will be found alive.
The two, who were born in the Philippines along with their older brother and grew up in Japan on a naval base before moving to the U.S., had been close. Mark Wakey described his brother as being very smart in school and had a knack for construction, starting his own company.
Not knowing what befell his brother has been eating their family.
“With my brother missing, he may be dead, and I honestly believe in my heart of hearts that he’s dead,” Mark Wakey said. “And there’s nobody to recover, I can’t recover his body and it doesn’t sit right with me. It’s not our way.”
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