BRUNSWICK, Maine — On Jan. 12, 2012, Doug Reil was awakened early in the morning by his son, who told him, not for the first time, his theory about the federal government conspiring to overcharge people for prescription drugs.
Jason Reil, 33 at the time, felt it was his responsibility to find the truth. Agitated and unfocused without the antipsychotic medication he’d stopped taking to treat schizophrenia, Jason told his dad, “I gotta go for a walk.”
“He was itching to get going,” Doug said in 2013. “I said, ‘Jason, promise me you’ll take your medications today and call your doctor and tell them what you told me.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’”
Doug never saw his son again. In June 2014, just 57 years old, Doug died, heartbroken, depressed and tired.
“I think at that point he was just giving up,” Doug’s sister-in-law, Tammy, said recently. “He was so tired. He didn’t want to do it anymore.”
In the years since Jason disappeared, Doug was determined to find his son, who had battled the demons and voices for years. Like many with serious mental illness, Jason went off and on his prescribed antipsychotics when he couldn’t tolerate the side effects.
Despite efforts of family and friends, local police, game wardens and missing persons organizations, Jason seemed to have simply disappeared. Doug never recovered.
In memory of Doug, his brother, Ken Reil and Ken’s wife Tammy Charles-Reil, have renewed the search. Although Ken and Tammy now live in South Carolina, this weekend, friends will distribute fliers throughout midcoast Maine offering $500 for for any information that directly leads to locating Jason.
‘Missing Jason Reil’
On Jan. 25, 2012, with no word from his son for nearly two weeks, Doug called the police.
Brunswick Police Detective Rich Cutliffe, who led the investigation for several years, said at the time that Jason apparently walked out of his own apartment, just blocks from Doug’s, and left his cellphone, wallet, keys – even his glasses — on the counter. His car was in the driveway and two disability checks were found uncashed in his mailbox.
Police spotted Jason on security camera footage dated Jan. 19 at the Brunswick Rite-Aid, where he picked up prescriptions for two antipsychotics. Doug later said the orange bottles of pills were found in Jason’s medicine cabinet.
Police learned from Jason’s journals that he’d been hearing a young girl’s voice, and believed it was a hallucination, Brunswick Police Cmdr. Mark Waltz said Thursday.
His bank records, prescription card and a card allowing him to access disability benefits showed no new activity, Brunswick police said a year after Jason disappeared.
Despite Jason’s history of suicide attempts — he bore scars on both wrists, had once overdosed on his prescription medication and once jumped from a car speeding down the highway — Doug held fast to the idea that his son was still alive.
The family set up a Facebook page, Missing Jason Reil, hoping for information. On Feb. 16, Maine game wardens with dogs arrived at the Brunswick Police station — at the time located just across from Jason’s apartment — and with local officers searched 60 acres of woods behind his apartment.
“I personally don’t think that anything will [come] of this because I think Jason is in Portland, Maine,” Doug posted on Facebook at the time. “He has been seen there on several occasions. But anything that may find him is appreciated … Thanks again for all your prayers and well wishes. I know that he will be found soon.”
Doug reluctantly thought of the Androscoggin River that runs between Brunswick and Topsham, but it was clogged with ice at the time and within a month or so, the dark water would rush into the Atlantic with the spring thaw.
Brunswick police investigated several phone calls that year from people saying they saw Jason at the Brunswick Wal-Mart, the Hilton Garden Inn in Auburn, in downtown Brunswick and on Congress Street in Portland, where someone reported seeing “a tall, bald man yelling aimlessly at people.”
Brunswick police listed Jason in the National Crime Information Center so that if another department finds a body that matches his description, they’ll call Brunswick. He’s also listed in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, according to Waltz.
The trail goes cold
At least twice during the next couple of years, Cutliffe called Doug to say a body had been found that seemed to match Jason’s description.
In 2012, the Orangeburg Sheriff’s Office called from South Carolina after discovering a body matching Jason’s description, but the DNA didn’t match that from a swab taken from Doug Reil’s cheek.
A year later, a man who said he’d known Jason for years called to say he was raking leaves at his therapist’s office in Sanford and Jason pulled up in a truck and they chatted. Waltz said the doctor had no recollection of seeing Jason, and the lead went cold.
Tammy contacted a psychic, but said the woman told her she couldn’t “do a reading” on a missing person because if someone had hurt Jason, the assailant might take revenge on the psychic’s family.
Soon, the phone calls stopped. At first, Doug held out hope that Jason was out there — maybe out West, he said, where his son had once dreamed of visiting.
But in 2013, Doug stopped leaving his house and “couldn’t handle anything,” Tammy said. “We decided it would be best if he came down here and stayed with us.”
‘Dark space’
Before he left for South Carolina, Doug shared with the Bangor Daily News his theories about what could have happened to Jason. He might have been abducted, Doug said one day in his apartment. Or he could have tried to “disconnect his life” and start another somewhere else.
But Doug said one possibility haunted him — that Jason succumbed to the voices he heard once he stopped taking antipsychotics, became more delusional, “and [voices] in his head told him to go somewhere, and he killed himself and no body’s ever been found.”
“I’ve been so depressed all year,” he said that day, surrounded by boxes and green plastic bags stuffed with clothing and belongings. “I just can’t handle this anymore. I want closure on this so bad. I want to know one way or the other … If he’s passed, let me know. Somebody tell me he’s gone so I can put some closure on this and say, ‘OK, well at least he’s not suffering anymore.’”
Doug loaded his things in his truck — which until the day he died bore a photo of Jason taped to the window — and drove with his sister, Vicki, to South Carolina. He stayed with his brother until he found his own place nearby.
“At that point, he wanted to give up, physically and emotionally,” Tammy said. “He didn’t want to accept any possibility other than ‘Jason’s out there, I just want to know he’s OK, and after that he can start a new life if he wants.’”
Doug had diabetes and underwent bypass surgery in about 2004, Tammy said. But she was most concerned about the “dark space” he was in.
On June 8, 2014, Doug died in his sleep. His obituary lists Jason among his survivors.
“I watched my brother deteriorate through the guilt that he felt at letting Jason go home that day,” Ken Reil said Thursday. “For not putting more pressure on him to take his meds or see his doctor. As much as I tried to convince him that he could only do so much and it would help for a while, that conversation would come back around so I know that he never really let it go.”
Earlier this year, Tammy started a new Facebook page, Missing and Loved – Jason Reil, where she wrote, in part, “Many have resigned themselves to thinking you will never come home. That you chose to stop the voices. Even if that is the outcome, we want you home. So you can be at peace with your Dad. He missed you so much it hurt. Find a way Jay. Please come back to us. We love and miss you.”
Tammy and Ken started putting money away to offer a reward for information leading to Jason’s return, hoping to prompt those who knew him to look twice. On Wednesday, with the assistance of Brunswick police, they posted the flier on Facebook offering a reward.
“I continue to pray for answers that will bring closure for the Reil family,” Cutliffe said.
“Maybe someone who knew something or saw something will say, ‘Hey, cha-ching’ — which is sad, but if that’s what it takes, so be it,” Tammy said. “He couldn’t just vanish. I don’t care if he’s just jumping trains riding across country, or if his schizophrenia is so bad he has no idea who he is. We have nothing to go by, so we can’t make assumptions.”
“He was a really cool guy,” Tammy said of Jason. “When he was on his meds, he hung out with everyone and socialized a lot. He would come over to our house when we lived in Maine and make my kids pictures. He loved to draw.”
Anyone with information about Jason Reil’s whereabouts should call the Brunswick Police Department at 207-721-4300.