It’s overwhelmingly sad that so many people go missing every year in Colorado. In early 2025, the Colorado Bureau of Investigations held a ceremony to honor the (at the time) 680 Coloradans that had been missing for more than one year. This man from Longmont was a part of that ceremony; 2025 marked seven years of him being missing.
In this case, John Samuel Rice had been away from his family’s home for nearly two years before the Weld Sheriff was informed and started their investigation. According to the Weld Sheriff, though John often travel across the county, from coast-to-coast, his sister became worried about her brother after him being gone 696 days. John had said that had gotten a call from God to leave home; he was 32 at the time.
It was in October of 2020 that Weld Sheriff deputies and detectives began working on the case and trying to track John down. They did find that he had been in contact with authorities in Pooler, Georgia (just northeast of Savannah) in 2019; but that didn’t lead to John. The Weld authorities reached out to local homeless shelters, hospitals, police stations, and hospitals in Colorado and Georgia to find him; but nothing came up…