So this is what we know. Devon Hollahan is a young gentleman who is a English instructor in Prague. Devon came up to Frankfurt a week ago...to attend a concert. Somewhere, after the concert, near 3AM and a couple of beers...he and a friend ended up over near the Hotel Luxor and were walking toward the Taunusalange metro station. The friend stopped to ask directions and turned away from Devon for about two minutes. When he turned back around....Devon was gone. Seven days have passed now...and Davon hasn't shown up anywhere.
Devon's dad....Jeff Hollahan, a respected stock analyst out in Arizona is pretty concerned over the situation...even possibly thinking it was a kidnapping.
The family has now gone into turbo...trying to generate media attention in Frankfurt to get people out looking for Devon.
It is curious to note that Devon had a cellphone...and none of the text messages or phone calls have been answered since that evening.
I sat there....pondering over the episode. I know Frankfurt. I was stationed there in 1978/1979. I even went back a few times in the 1984 and 1985 period.
Frankfurt is a metropolitan city with several dimensions.
First, up until the mid-1980s...it was completely safe to walk around the middle of town at night. The drug scene in the midst of town....down around the train station...now makes it a bit questionable to walk there after dark unless with a group.
Second...the real party district of Frankfurt...is just across the river in Sachsenhausen. Typically...this is where folks go to party and get drunk. The trolley cars run just by the area up until 1AM and then shuts down until around 4:30AM. This explains why the guys were using a taxi at 3AM in the morning.
The Hotel Luxor? It's just about 1,500 feet from the river...where three bridges lie within easy walking distance of each other. It would have taken less than twenty minutes for some drunk guy to walk the 1,500 feet and end up at the river's edge.
The redlight district angle to this story? Well....the guys are at least fifteen minutes walking from beginnings of the zone. I would probably relabel the redlight district as the heroin/redlight district because of the significant amount of drugs in the zone. The weirdos though....would have been much closer to the train station, and not 6,000 feet away at the Hotel Luxor area.
I don't buy the kidnapping story because the kidnappers would have reacted quickly and made the parents aware of not involving the cops. Seven days have passed....nothing in the way of a note from any kidnappers. So I'm discarding this threat.
My belief? If the locals are searching for this kid....get the friend to point out the last spot he remembered seeing him and then identify every construction site within 1,000 feet in any direction. Go through all of the construction sites...especially in basements or pits. The guy was drunk, and he could have easily fallen into a hidden place.
The other likelihood is the river. He might have made it to the river and simply fallen in. Eventually...his body would turn up somewhere...down the river.
Here's the thing about Frankfurt. At one point, there were around 10,000 American GI's who lived within easy distance of the city and partied every Friday and Saturday night there. No one ever disappeared. It's not one of those cities where you'd expect a guy to just totally disappear (Moscow, Rio, Chicago). There's bad things that happen in the city...that's the sad advancing truth of the town.
Finally...alot of guys go and get drunk in Frankfurt....and then end up doing some drugs...of a more drastic nature. The friend's story is limited...he has no one to really back up portions of it. It may be in the end...that the two were partying with another group...drugs came out...the two were drunk enough to do some....Devon reacted badly...and died there. The body got dumped somewhere else....not to raise suspicions. I say this....only because of the Aruba episode and the Bama gal.
So this weekend...there will likely be a effort taken to find Devon. I wish the group luck in this endeavor...but I think it's probably too late.
No comments:
Post a Comment