Hannah Kobayashi’s mysterious non-disappearance, explained

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Editor’s note, December 11, 3:15 pm ET: On December 11, Hannah Kobayashi’s family told TMZ they had been in contact with Hannah that day and confirmed that she is safe.

The twists and turns in the ongoing story of Hannah Kobayashi, who went missing in Los Angeles last month after failing to get on her connecting flight to New York, have kept the public riveted for nearly a month.

But now, amid a family tragedy that includes the death of Kobayashi’s father by apparent suicide, police have determined Kobayashi might have walked away from her life voluntarily.

Los Angeles police announced Monday that they’d reviewed surveillance video showing a woman they believed to be Kobayashi on November 12, the day her family reported her missing. Kobayashi, who is from Hawaii, had failed to complete a flight from her home state to New York City. The footage shows a woman who appears to be Kobayashi at a Los Angeles bus station, buying a ticket to the border. Police say she used her passport to make the purchase, then crossed over into Mexico from San Ysidro.

The investigation is the second high-profile missing persons case in recent weeks to take an unexpected turn after the person turned up seemingly unharmed. On November 11, the day before Kobayashi’s family reported her missing, a Wisconsin man resurfaced after being missing for months to admit that he had faked his own death in a dramatic kayaking incident in order to escape his life and start over in Eastern Europe. Los Angeles investigators felt that Kobayashi had likewise walked away from her own life and that, until she decided to resurface, there was little they could do.

“To date, the investigation has not uncovered any evidence that Kobayashi is being trafficked or is the victim of foul play. She is also not a suspect in any criminal activity,” Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell stated during a news conference. “She has a right to her privacy, and we respect her choices but we also understand the concern her loved ones feel for her.”

There are several alarming differences between the two cases, beginning with the sharp and sudden turn in Kobayashi’s trajectory. The 30-year-old Maui resident was a free spirit with a love of art, photography, and the outdoors before she boarded a flight to visit a relative on November 8. It was supposed to be her first trip to the New York City — something she’d had on her “bucket list” of places to see — and she had plans to see a Broadway show with a friend before traveling upstate.

She was sharing the flight with an ex-boyfriend, though they reportedly sat in different parts of the plane, and he doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with her disappearance. Kobayashi didn’t join him on their connecting flight out of LAX. Instead, she left the airport. Security footage caught her getting on the Metro headed toward downtown Los Angeles. After her family reported her missing, multiple people reported having seen her at The Grove shopping mall on November 9 and 10. Eagle-eyed web sleuths spotted her appearing on camera 31 seconds into a video shot at a LeBron James Nike event held there. Hannah even uploaded a photo from the event to her own Instagram — the last post she’s made there to date.

During her days spent in the city, she sent a series of alarming texts to family and friends. One text spoke of “Deep Hackers” who “wiped my identity, stole all of my funds, & have had me on a mind fuck since Friday,” while another claimed she’d been “tricked pretty much into giving away all my funds. From someone I thought I loved.”

She also told family she’d missed her flight to New York but reportedly used language that family members thought didn’t sound like her. One such suspect text, containing odd endearments she didn’t typically use, said, “I’m just really scared love & the redwoods if calling me & I know I’m meant to be there, I’m being guided there, like you have before … I risk my freedom if this goes wrong for me hun.” Another spoke of her having “just finished a very intense spiritual awakening.” In one text, Kobayashi reportedly claimed that she was scared and afraid to go home.

“Even though she was in contact with us, she wasn’t in contact with us in her right mind,” her aunt, Larie Pidgeon, told USA Today.

“I just need to rest & I’ll think better,” one text to her mother, sent on November 11, reportedly read. “But it’s very complicated Matrix underworld shit.” It was one of her final communications to her family. Her final texts indicated she was returning to the airport and promised to keep her family posted. Although she did return to the airport, she ultimately only picked up her luggage, which she’d requested to have flown back from New York to LA. That evening, according to a Facebook post made by her family, she was spotted getting off the Metro near Crypto.com Arena (formerly Staples Center). Her family claimed in the post that they’d seen footage of the sighting which indicated that Hannah “does not appear to be in good condition” and she is not alone.

After November 11, her phone was turned off, and by the following week, Kobayashi had fallen off the grid — she’d stopped sending text updates, and family and friends fanned out across the city to search for her. We now know that she had already crossed the border into Mexico, but her family claimed they had only radio silence from LAPD about what, if anything, they had learned, leaving them to search for answers alone. After the family held a public rally on November 21, police finally got in touch with them, though it would still be another week before any answers arrived.

In the middle of the family’s fear that she’d been abducted or trafficked, and amid enormous and growing public speculation about what happened to her, her father Ryan Kobayashi was searching for her.

On November 15, he told KHNL Hawaii News Now that he’d experienced a “lot of worrying, a lot of confusion. Everything is just a blur it seems, because I haven’t slept well since I’ve heard the news.” He went on to ask Hannah to get in touch with the police or with her family.

“There’s a lot of people out there that care and love you, Hannah,” he said. “If you can just get to somebody, whatever you can do … just let us know that you’re okay.”

At some time around 4 am on November 24, Ryan Kobayashi died by suicide in Los Angeles.

“I’m going to continue to stay strong for you,” Hannah Kobayashi’s sister Sydni wrote on social media. “We’re going to find Hannah.”

Despite indications that Kobayashi may have been suffering from a mental break or another form of mental illness, Pidgeon pushed back on this possibility. “She has no record on that,” she told NBC on November 15. “She is not on medication. Hannah’s someone that we can call and she’s going to call us back within an hour.”

Pidgeon further criticized the public speculation about Hannah’s disappearance for pushing her father to a breaking point. Conspiracy theories online abounded about what happened to her, everything from run-ins with the Twin Flames new-age cult to bad drug trips gone haywire. “If Ryan is looking at all this shit, imagine that weighing on him?” she told the New York Post, which had previously reported sensationalized details like Kobayashi having paid for a tarot reading while she was out and about in LA.

In their announcement that they would be changing Kobayashi’s status to that of a “voluntary missing person,” the LAPD claimed that Kobayashi had evinced a desire to “step away from modern connectivity.” This included old social media posts she’d made where she seemed to want to “disconnect from her phone,” according to Missing Persons investigator Lt. Douglas Oldfield.

Still, the family continued to press for answers, vowing that the search for Hannah would continue. It won’t, however, be continuing as publicly as before. The burgeoning Facebook group “Help Us Find Hannah,” which grew to over 25,000 members, went private after the announcement on Monday, with family members reportedly claiming to have received “threats against their lives and the lives of their small children.” It’s unclear what if anything provoked the threats, but it is clear that public speculation and scrutiny surrounding Kobayashi’s disappearance had spiraled in the weeks since she first left LAX. On Tuesday, moderators of Reddit’s r/Hawaii subreddit locked their post about the disappearance because it was “starting to see a lot of baseless conspiracy theories.”

However complicated Kobayashi’s story is, it seems abundantly clear that her family is right to be alarmed for her safety. It’s also increasingly evident that while the era of social media and heightened public scrutiny over police investigations can be uniquely beneficial, it can also be extremely overwhelming, obfuscatory, and frustrating to family, friends, and officials trying to find loved ones. While the huge number of eyes on Hannah as she went on her journey was undoubtedly helpful in locating her, false sightings and far-fetched rumors may have made it harder on the family. Hannah Kobayashi’s situation, however alarming, was and is potentially resolvable. It’s impossible to know whether the tragedy of her father’s suicide could have been avoided if her disappearance hadn’t become headline-grabbing news, but it almost certainly didn’t help.

Still, while it’s tempting to blame Ryan Kobayashi’s death on the media and public frenzy, the real stressors might have been much closer to home. He had told CNN that he and Hannah had not been close when she was growing up and that they “hadn’t had contact for a while.”

“I’m just trying to make up,” he said. “I’m trying to get her back. That’s my main focus.”

The grim but less complicated takeaway from this series of tragic events might be just this: The mighty apparatus of true crime theorizing and crowdsourced web sleuthing can often make family tragedies into labyrinthine mysteries when they aren’t. Sometimes, the answers may be undramatic and unsatisfying — but perhaps the simpler they are, the less they lead us astray.