Daniel Traina (8 of Diamonds, Florida)

In a new audio-check limited series, the truth about Natalie, Hoseong-Cyping bestigates

“the disappearance and death of 27-year-old Natalie Jones.”

What starts as a missing person's case uncovers allegations of abuse, hidden secrets, conflicting evidence, and one haunting question was Natalie the victim of a tragic accident, or did someone have a reason to silence her. Listen to the truth about Natalie now, wherever you get your podcasts. Our card this week is Daniel Traina, the aid of diamonds from Florida.

49-year-old Daniel Traina was hard to miss.

The six foot four happy go-lucky guy was always bumping around the West Palm Beach suburb

of Lake Park, well-known to bartenders, store clerks, and neighbors. So it was mind-boggling when in May of 2021 Daniel walked out of a 7/11 next to Florida's busy federal highway and vanished into the sticky human night leaving behind no clues. And this day in age with electronics, I mean, how could somebody this happened with cameras everywhere?

I mean, it just, it daffles my mind. And as investigators have tried to retrace Daniel's final movements and worked their way through those closest to him, the case has taken on a distinctly south Florida feel. An ocean-side town, a 7/11 sign glowing in the dark, a cast of eccentric characters, conflicting stories, and a mystery that five years later still has everyone asking.

“How did someone who was so hard to miss vanish without a trace?”

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. David Traina was at home on a hot Saturday afternoon making sales calls when a call from his sister came in that would change his life. My sister called me frantic and said, you know, Daniel was missing. Dan was his beloved younger brother, Daniel, who just turned 49 earlier that week.

He's like, what do you mean he's missing? His roommate called the police and said, the missing person's report hasn't seen it for four days. I was like, well, that's a part. I talked about his birthday.

The first thing I did is called my brother.

I called both phone lines when divorced male. I reached out via email. I reached out via text message. I reached out via Facebook. I reached out ex, every other avenue is social media.

I haven't had with him Instagram trying to get over yet, you're scaring us, you know, please let me you're okay. What's going on? No answer. Before Daniel even came into this world, David was looking out for his younger brother.

He was four years old when he learned he was getting a sibling. My mom said she was pregnant, which, you know, being four years old, I had no idea what that meant. I just knew that baby brother was coming. Are you ready for your baby brother?

I was excited. It was a big deal. My mother was like, he's coming. He's going to be here soon and when he was born, I was upset because he was in the crib and couldn't do anything.

“I remember looking at him and going, "Why can't you get up?”

How can you get up? You can't run around with me." And once Daniel could get up and run around. He and David were inseparable while growing up on the Jersey Shore. We did everything together.

Everything in throughout our lives, basketball, sports, girls, everything, we were around.

It was always following me, it was a lot bigger than him.

So I was always protected him. I was a big brother. He was, you know, saying somebody's picking out in the school. I'm going to go to the school and, you know, beat somebody up or threatened somebody. They leave him alone.

The boys' father was a contractor and the family moved to Boca Retone in the 80s, lured by Florida's real estate boom and the year-round sunny weather. He loved Florida. He got into paddleboarding as he got older, but fishing was his love. He loved to fish, my dad had a boat, we see we're on the fish all the time.

By the time Daniel reached high school, the little brother David had always protected was not so little anymore. He grew to be six foot four and 180 pounds and as David remembers. He had a sight 17 shoes, so I used to tease him all the time, so he was L. He looked at him sideways, because his feet were so big, he was so skinny.

to real estate. And so Daniel got his real estate license, started doing real estate rent holes, things that nature. Because my dad and I all three of us are very similar, we put it heads. So I wasn't fun working for your dad and so what he started doing was he learned computers.

Around the time he got married in 2001, Daniel started building a life that, from the outside, looked pretty idyllic. He began working in email marketing and bought a house with his wife in Loxahatchi, about 40 minutes west of the Palm Beach coastline. It was there that they raised their three kids while Daniel worked from home.

He worked in his garage and tees me, because I was in a suit and tie, I went into sales, and I had to go to work and, you know, I had to dress up and he'd be in his box of shorts on the computer all day, clicking buttons and making more money than I was, so. But in 2008, Daniel filed for divorce from his wife. They sold the family home in Loxahatchi, and he eventually purchased a new one closer to

the water in a small west Palm suburb called Lake Park. House was small, a little too bedroom, one bathroom home, 1,000 square feet. But it was his, bought a paid for cash, no mortgage to the house, I was very proud of that all that time living there, right by the fish and spot, I read across from the Maria where he could fish.

Daniel enjoyed the easy living that he found in Lake Park. But in August of 2019, things started unraveling. First, he lost his beloved mother and Marie. He was a mama's boy. He was the favorite.

My brother when he was younger, he was a sickly kid, and some other always coddled him.

And so, even when he was divorcing, I'd older, he would always bring his clothes there. She would do his clothes, she would cook for him, he didn't cook for himself, he didn't know how to cook. As Daniel was still grieving that loss, the entire world was hit with something that not even some of the most stable people off their axis.

COVID hit, and with the combination of both of them, he really went through a tough time. Myself, because he was by himself, I had my wife, and we were together, and so we were shut down, and you know, sheltered in place, but we had each other. He had nobody else by himself, and I think from there, and this was after he was a paddle boarding, and he could even do that anymore.

He was just a shut-in place, he had to sit on, is when he probably turned to drinking excessively. I didn't know because he hit it well, and he'd time you to ask any of us, I were fine.

Even my dad always, he's not fine.

We know we're not fine.

“We just don't talk about it, because that's how we were raised.”

Just, you know, we're everything's fine, keep it inside, and continue to move on. David says he tried to get his brother help, even offering to go with him to AA or narcotics anonymous. But Daniel would agree, and then never follow through. His brother's struggle with addiction is something that still makes him emotional.

He'd spent his whole life looking out for his younger brother, and even when things got hard, he refused to give up on Daniel. I talked to police once a week. I always check on him, my wife and I would stop off and bring food to him, because he didn't cook.

So my wife's a very good cook, 'cause I'm looking at me, I'm not a skinny person.

And so we'd always make sure we brought him food.

Big CD stuff that he'd wish to love, and we'd drop it off when we'd see him. On May 25th, 2021, David checked in like he always did. It was already an important day for Daniel, but later that call would mean something else entirely.

“I call my brother and say, "Hey, have you birthed there?”

Can't believe you're so old. You catch them to me, joking around, 'cause we're getting older." And he was fine. He said, "What are you going to do? You're going to go out.

You're going to dinner." He goes down, it's going to go out probably for a couple of drinks, to get some lunch or whatever with a few friends. I was like, "Okay, that's cool." And then, four days later, I found out he was missing through my sister.

On May 29th, it was the boy's younger sister Desiree, who got a call from one of Daniel's former girlfriends, telling her that something was wrong. She said that their brother hadn't been seen in days, and Daniel's roommate, 53-year-old Roy Smith, had reported him missing. And he was disabled veteran from what I understood, because I'm a veteran as well, and

“David, the VA and the SSI was paying his bills, and he was paying Daniel, I think, 500”

bucks a month, or live in the room. That was okay. Well, that's good. And he was disabled veteran, I'm sure he's harmless, older guy. David and Desiree continued trying to reach Daniel by any means they could think of.

I mean, he may have been dodging his roommate, but if he was around somewhere, surely he would get in touch with them, right? But when there was still no word by June 1st, David and his wife hit the road at 11am

And immediately, the state of things at his place was caused for even more concern. David's wife photographed the inside and outside of the house that day to document its condition. The doors were open.

They were a bunch of people in the house that never met before in my life.

I never met with any people once. The house was in disarray. It smelled of urine. I was in shock, and then I was mad.

“Because I was like, what the heck are you guys doing in my brother's house?”

Everyone is couch, watching his TV, AC's on, you know, and the cable in the house because my brother was during the cancer culture's time during COVID, he canceled his Netflix account. So I gave my private video account and he was using that to watch TV. So when I went there, all these people were at my brother's house and watching this stuff, I was paying for on his TV on his couch, and my brother's nowhere to be found.

And they were like, there was nothing wrong. David says one of those people hanging out and seemingly without a care in the world was

Roy, and his elderly uncle, Sam Perry, who, David learned for the first time, was apparently

staying in the spare room with Roy. I only met Roy when my brother disappeared. And her body was living there, and I was like, what, and I was like, both of them living there? Drilled Roy, what's going on?

When my brother had what happened, you know, when's the last time he spoke to him? You know, why didn't you call sooner, you waited four days, you know, and he started to mention all he had a drug problem, a young, people money, and I mean, I heard all these

“different stories from him that I said, but what are you doing here?”

He goes, well, you know, I got street cred that he was like, he was an old man. So yeah, first he said he's security guard from my brother, which I thought was comical.

And then he said he was a landscaper, and I have pictures of the house, the house was

disgusting. I mean, everything was overgrown. David said it had been a few months since he'd last been at Daniel's house. But as he walked around that day, he noticed several key things missing, like the high-powered computer that Daniel had built for work, and the garage door.

I said what happened to all that stuff, he was, well, somebody came in and stole everything, and I was like, what happened to the garage door? Who goes to a brook, well, so where's the pieces at? Roy would later tell detectives that he was a scrapper, as in someone who collects metal objects to sell its scrapyards.

The garage door was aluminum, so David suspected that Roy sold the door for scrap.

“Now the moment David and his wife left that house, they called the Palm Beach Sheriff's”

office, which confirmed that a missing-person report had already been filed by Roy on May 29. But the case wasn't assigned a detective until June 3rd after David's call. Detective Milner, she got the preliminary case. She met with, you know, a halt Roy on the phone and went and visited him.

That's detective Jeff Weissman, who took over this case from Detective Milner two weeks in after she went out on maternity leave. Her files were his jumping off point. You know, they meet with a complaint, in this case it was Roy Smith. They gather as much information as they can, background-wise, friends, what he goes somewhere

to the leave town, and they also, you know, would enter the house to see if they were anything left behind and not. There was no note at Daniel's house and zero clue as to where he may have gone. Not even when they went through the home with a search warrant in hand a few weeks later. Purpose of that search warrant was to utilize a process, which we call blue star, which

is determined if there is any blood not visible to the human eye that was on the interior walls floor, it would also indicate if somebody had attempted to clean up a blood area using like bleach, you know, or cleaning product. We went out. It was around one in the morning and had to do it with the moonlight and everything else.

And then they use a special light to take the photos on that illuminate so that if there is anything there or not. Detective Weissman met with Roy himself, you know, get the story straight from the horses now. This story was pretty consistent.

He said that he'd last seen Daniel on the morning of May 20th at around 10 a.m. before the two went their separate ways for the day. But according to Roy, Daniel seemed a little out of sorts and he left something specific behind when he headed out the door that day. Daniel left his cell phone at the residence, which was very unlike him to leave the house

without the cell phone. He told police Daniel did that on purpose for a reason that only made the case stranger. He said that he left the house and he was afraid that somebody was gonna beat him up for

In a small town, unsolved stories don't fade away.

“They remain in the places people know by heart and in the lives of those who never stopped”

looking for answers. I'm Kylie Lowe, and on my podcast, Dark Down East, I cover true crime cases from my home state of Maine and New England with care, context, and the people impacted at the center of the story. These cases shaped communities even when the rest of the world moved on, listen to dark

down east wherever you get your podcasts. According to the detectives case summary, it was some guy's girlfriend, not wife that Daniel supposedly slept with. But Daniel was afraid of her boyfriend nonetheless. He apparently told Roy that this guy, of course, he didn't name him, was after him.

Roy didn't have any other information to know as far as the identity of this man or a woman that Daniel talked about before he left the house. But he left his cell phone there, which Roy said was very out of place for Daniel.

“He said that he left the phone with Roy because he was gonna call back later on that phone”

to see if anybody was there looking for. When detectives later access Daniel's phone, text messages, and Google location data, it showed that he went to a staples, two miles from his house, to purchase an internet router, before he returned home. His brother David found a receipt later that shows the staples purchase was made at

1134 a.m.

The phone never left Daniel's house after that.

But investigators learned that around 630 p.m., Daniel went to his friend's house, Mike Carponella's, about five minutes away. At the time, Daniel didn't have a car, but he didn't walk to Mike's. He got dropped off to the house by a black sedan. And the only information we got was the driver was a black male.

There was an other description, tag number, you know, maker model of the car. And that came from Mike Carponella, who told us that. He stayed at the house for about 45 minutes, had a couple beers, Mike Carponella said that he seemed normal, he wasn't, you know, absurdly drunk or didn't seem high on narcotics. But he was, you know, he mentioned this unknown man that was going to beat him up for sleeping

with his wife. For Neil Yero, who reported on this case for us, spoke with Mike on the phone about his encounter with Daniel that night. So, let me ask you, so that last night, you were going to allow people to see him.

“Can you tell me about what happened, like, where you saw him and how he was acting?”

He showed him a house and board shorts, no shirt, no shoes, and said somebody dropped him off the cold blocks and he ran there, because he was a little sweaty, but gave him some water. He's just talking crazy. He's just all over the place in conversation, you know?

Just take a one kind of topic, he was going from here to there to there to there. Do you think you're under the influence of anything? I don't know.

I never did anything like that, it was a matter of how.

So, did he mention anything about being scared of someone or anyone in life that was getting in problem? Well, he told me he had to use my phone because he left his phone as roommate. And he didn't tell you why he left it at the house? No, but he used my phone like four times to call his phone and then no one ever answered.

Detectives subpoenaed Mike Carponella's phone records, which showed that three calls were made from his phone to Daniels between 742 and 745 p.m. When Mike spoke with investigators after Daniel went missing, he said that he'd shown up to the house, sweating and paranoid, and mentioned that someone wanted to kill him because he'd slept with their wife.

And quote, "But in our interview with Mike, he didn't mention anyone specific to us." The one found thought was weird, he didn't have his phone with him, he left it at the house. Mike's roommate, Chris Markovic, was also at the house. At 838 p.m. Daniel left in an Uber that Chris ordered for him. But we Uber didn't matter, you're real quick, if you use this, I can crazy, so we would

amount to you real quick. We learned to his house, and then we heard to do if we weren't stopped at 7-11. He was supposed to go home. Daniel then changed it to drop him off at 7-11, which he did. He located the Uber driver who did pick up Daniel at the house and actually drive him.

He told us that midway to Daniel's residence, Daniel had asked him, "Hey, can you just drop me off at 7-11? I want to grab something." Driver said, "No problem, drop them off at 7-11." Driver did notice anything suspicious at the 7-11.

No odd vehicles that stuck out to him.

and he went on his way, picking up more rides.

“What happened next was captured on security camera footage from inside the store.”

We were able to obtain the video, but there is no time stamp on it. Detective Weisman told us that the footage from the three cameras that were working at the time appeared to have been captured somewhere between 830 p.m. and 9 p.m. Daniel goes into the 7-11, tries to use his debit card at the AT&M. You can see him on video in the store trying twice.

The machine wouldn't dispense any cash. At that time, Daniel goes to the counter, grabs a candy bar, and tries to purchase it at the counter using a different credit card.

That credit card was also declined.

At that time, Daniel was seen walking out the front door of the 7-11 toward the gas pump area and disappears from view.

“Earlier in this story, Mike Carponella told our reporter that when Daniel was at his”

house, he wasn't wearing a shirt or shoes, but in the video you can see that he is wearing a shirt. Now whether Mike's memory is fuzzy or Daniel had a shirt to put on, we don't know. But that's kind of the least of everyone's worries. Because after Daniel walks out of that 7-11, they lose him completely, at least visually.

There were no cameras from the 7-11 that were operational in the leaving the store toward the gas pump area. The 7-11 was about a little less than a half a mile away from Daniel's house. Daniel would walk there daily by various goods from the store. He would hang out there.

He knew the clerk from going there so much. The 7-11 employee spoke with investigators. He said there was nothing out of the ordinary about Daniel's appearance or demeanor that night. The clerk remembered the card not working, so he walked out the front door and he didn't

pay attention. He didn't see him go and speaking with anybody in the parking lot or getting into a car or nothing that he saw. Detectives can visit the businesses and homes between the 7-11 and Daniel's house. And they found a couple of residences that had security cameras, but there weren't no signs

of Daniel on any of them. There was only one more digital trace connected to Daniel that they ever found after he walked out of that 7-11. Approximately an hour later, after Daniel had left the store, his ATM card was tried to be used that I walk up ATM at a Chase Bank located in Jupiter, Florida.

They attempted to use a pin, but it was declined. And this would have been the same card that Daniel attempted to use inside the 7-11 at the ATM there and it didn't work. This location would have been too far to go on foot, as far as him walking there, it would have been too far.

The ATM did have a camera system, which we did contact Chase Bank, unfortunately, the camera for the ATM wasn't working that night, so we got no footage from it. The ATM in Jupiter is almost 10 miles north of the 7-11 where Daniel was last seen.

And certainly, not on the way to his home in Lake Park, which is less than a third of

a mile south or a five-minute walk from the convenience store. So how did Daniel get to the ATM in Jupiter within an hour, certainly not on foot, whoever

“used Daniel's ATM card got there by car, and if it wasn't Daniel, who was it?”

At night, Daniel had done the impossible in today's day and age. He was gone without a trace. Without a single piece of digital evidence to track Daniel, detectives tried working backwards. They began looking more closely into his life and the people in it to understand who he was associating with and who could have a motive to harm him. And as detectives try to piece everything together, a picture emerged of someone who was struggling

in ways that may have made him vulnerable. It was obvious that Daniel was suffering from money problems and he was kind of spiraling downhill on the way to rock bottom as far as the alcohol and some of the drug use that we've learned from people interviewing in this case. And just some of the people he was generally hanging around with.

In fact, money problems were precisely why Daniel took in Sam Perry and Roy Smith as

generating income from work because Daniel had also recently lost his email marketing job.

“They went up letting him go during the COVID stuff. I don't know because of him drinking”

not being able to do his metrics for email marketing or because of COVID or a combination of both. So he lost his job there. Since his brother had received a $25,000 COVID hardship grant, but the money went quickly. So Roy and Sam entered the picture and literally the house. They moved in just a few months before Daniel's disappearance. Uncle Sam and his nephew Roy were still there

on June 9 when Detective Weiss van came onto the case. He and his partner went to the house that day to talk to them. By now, Daniel had been missing for two full weeks. We spoke with Roy Smith who started really naming some individuals who he described as sex workers and narcotic users. Investigators learned from Roy and others they spoke with that Daniel

“was seeing several women. So they had to ask where any of them perhaps connected to the”

guy that Daniel thought was after him. And one of the first names that Roy gave them

was Shawanda Alvin. Roy continued to tell us that the relationship with Shawanda and Daniel was kind of toxic. Shawanda had slapped Daniel in front of Roy before. She had stayed at the house as well with Daniel for a period of time and then eventually Daniel made her leave the residence because the relationship wasn't working out. Roy also stated that Shawanda would have people come over and there were some drug sales out of

the house and bringing a crowd that Daniel didn't want to the residence. People he didn't know and so forth. So he told Shawanda to leave. Shawanda was interviewed by the police.

She admitted to having an intimate relationship with Daniel but apparently wasn't very cooperative

and didn't want anyone knowing that she'd spoken to police. Still detectives found nothing tying her to Daniel's disappearance or to whatever man it was that he feared. We attempted to reach Shawanda by phone and email for comment but we have not received a response. While Daniel didn't have a strong digital trail for the day he disappeared, his phone left behind at his house did help paint a picture of the days before. Going through Daniel's

phone, we noticed some pictures and some text messages that were the night before Daniel left the house and this came from a girl identified as rich nonetheless. Talking with Roy, we learned that original lived directly on the same street as Daniel about four houses down. In his phone some of these photos that Richna was sending Daniel were kind of provocative in nature. She stated that she did come over to Daniel's house the night before he went

missing and had a sexual relationship with him that night. But she then said that she left the house the next day. Roy backed us up with his information. Roy said she was aware that Richna had come to the house and Daniel had mentioned to him that he was going to have sex with her.

“The time here is important because remember the detective's case summary says that Roy told”

them Daniel said he had sex with someone's girlfriend last night the night before he went missing and that is when the boyfriend was mad at him or after him. Now Richna didn't have a boyfriend or at least that is what she told police. Richna was cooperative with us in the investigation. Didn't try to hide anything. She was quite helpful. She also found that Daniel would invite Roy Smith and his uncle. She made

comment that Daniel was kind of going down a bad path. He was drinking a lot in the last month that she noticed by seeing him on the street and so forth. She seemed kind of concerned about. We tried calling in texting Richna to see if she would speak more about Daniel and the case. We did not receive a response and I was really hoping that she would talk to us so I could

ask her if she knew someone named John because detectives found another interesting message on Daniel's phone. We did notice one peculiar text message from a guy named Johnboro. In the message Johnboro

In a small town, unsolved stories don't fade away. They remain in the places people know

“by heart and in the lives of those who never stopped looking for answers. I'm Kylie Lowe”

and on my podcast, Dark Down East, I cover true crime cases from my home state of Maine in New England with care, context and the people impacted at the center of the story. These cases shaped communities even when the rest of the world moved on. Listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. This message from Johnboro seemed to fit squarely into the narrative Roy had laid out

for police. Daniel had slept with someone's girlfriend and they were after him. It seems

like it could have been Johnboro. Except they didn't know who Johnboro was. The number

was likely a burner. It didn't come back to any real name or address and getting people

“in Daniel's world to talk? Good luck. While Roy seemed cooperative, they were stone walled”

by everyone else in Daniel's circle at every turn. David eventually got so frustrated with the lack of progress that he hired a PI. After the initial month he was missing, my brother's friends and myself got together and we hired both details office at a New York City. Both details, you know, they're a movie star PI firm at a New York City. They're not cheap. So this friends put together about $10,000 and got that office to look into the

case. Carlos Cotonio oversaw the investigation for the firm. He says that his team's first

challenge was getting close enough to the people in Daniel's world to earn their trust and to get them talking. When you're dealing with this kind of world, unfortunately, there are people who have things that they want to hide or they had bad experiences with investigators or the police in the past. So a lot of the report building needs to come in and say, you know, we're looking for danger. We're not interested in what you may be doing. We're not interested

in anything like that. We're not the police. We're not looking to bust you for drug use or sales or whatever else. You might be interested in a casual kind of mode. I don't have a badge. And I have a gun. I come at them as a person. You know, and I'm working for a family and working for loved ones that someone that something happened to her that we were trying to get interested. We're not looking to prosecute them. We're not looking to turn the man. We're not also

we're not looking for them to be a snitch or an informant. We just want some answers. One of the people they spoke with was Richna Nichols who told them something that she hadn't shared with police before. Richna told us that Roy Smith had confided in her that if we wanted to, we could take everything this guy has. And to David, that lined up with the fear that he had about Roy from the beginning that once Daniel was gone, Roy didn't just stay in the house.

“He acted as if it belonged to him. Oh, yeah, no, we're to live. So I think in his mind, he thought,”

"Well, I'm just going to take over as Danny has lived in this house." It's bought and paid for. It's my house now. It didn't help that Roy stayed in the house for over a year. Until Daniel's ex-wife and children went through the courts to evict him in 2022. To this day, David Traina, things detectives should have pressed Roy harder. But anytime I told that that police officer, the Roy's been nothing but fantastic. He's answered every question voluntarily without an attorney.

I was like, "Well, he can't afford a attorney. How's he going to have an attorney?" We were unable to locate Roy for comment. In his uncle, Sam Perry passed away recently. We asked detective Wiespin if Roy or Sam should have been looked at closer as potential suspects. I really don't think so. Nothing we uncovered in the investigation, you know, let us to believe that they did anything to Daniel. They seemed to believe his story. That Daniel left.

And when he did, he was scared of someone who was after him for sleeping with their girl. They even had a text message to that effect in Daniel's phone from the elusive John Bro. They didn't know it for sure, but they felt confident that John Bro was going to hold some answers, so they continued working leads, trying to track him down. Well, that took two and a half years. But in November of 2023, detective Wiespin and his partner went to the Palm Beach Sheriff's

We confronted John Smith with the text message and he stated, I mean, John said that,

“yeah, I remember that text message and that he was referring to a girl named Alina who was a”

sex worker that John was close with at the time that Daniel had had sex whether in John Bro was upset with him for it. John Smith stated that the two of them worked it out and they had met in person after the text was sent and that was the end of that. Daniel was a big guy. I mean, you know, he wasn't a guy that, you know, you would go up to and want to pick a fight with. You know, John Smith wasn't, you know, his pint size. So, you know, I don't think nothing came to fruition

as far as, you know, looking at John Smith as a hardcore suspect. Alina, the woman at the center of the argument was identified as Alina Dimarchi. She was actually the person who had called Daniel's sister back on May 29, 2021 and informed her that no one had seen Daniel in a few days. And she was

“more than just a casual hookup of Daniels. The two had been involved kind of on and off since 2018.”

She was a 30 something year old female that apparently she was pregnant with her brothers twins at one time and they were engaged to each other from one to understand. She had a miscarriage and they were together all for non. Probably kind of a toxic relationship, but they were together all the time. David said that Alina also struggled with substance use disorder. By this time, Daniel had been missing for more than two and a half years with still no answer. So David began doing some of his own

digging and he managed to track Alina down to see what she knew about his brother's disappearance. I assure what happened to my brother. Do you know what happened? She didn't make too much sense.

Detectives never found any evidence tying John Lee Smith or Alina to Daniel's disappearance.

They've never been able to tie anyone to it. Our reporting team reached out for comment, but we never heard back. But detective Weissman thinks that someone was responsible for making Daniel vanish. He didn't just wonder off alone and meet his fate, whatever it was. Weissman points to what he says was the last substantial development investigators have had in this case. That attempt to use Daniels ATM card after he was seen leaving 7/11.

Somebody obviously met Daniel at that 7/11 or close by and took him to the ATM way up the road. We actually physically have Daniel seen as his last point. On camera walking out of the 7/11, we have them leaving there. But we have his ATM card used several miles up the street to the north at a walk up ATM. Now the area where that was where the ATM was, you know, just going a little north, there's a wildlife preserve along the coast. That type of area, very marshy,

humid, wooded, wet, very wet. If Daniel would have disappeared into an environment like that, you could have easily disappeared and not be found. Something happened. Something happened to him.

He would never leave that house for a stop. That was his pride and joy that house. His kids

made granted during this time. He was struggling with his addictions and stuff. But he would never leave his children and not know what was going on with them. I've talked him a little bit, but their mother is kind of in between us. So I don't really get a chance to talk to them at all. I hope this helps out there, able to see this and see that I'm not going to give up because this is not fair to them. It's not fair to my family. You know, we've got to find out what happened to him.

Daniel also left behind Toby. His beagle lab pug mix that lives with David now. Anybody that's, you know, skinny and over six foot three, he thinks it's his dance, thinks it's Daniel. He walks up to him and looks at him all the time. And then he would get there.

He realizes not him. But he always looks for him. I know that. This is the last piece of my brother

that I have left. It's really him. It's Toby. I've ever, ever mind, or every day that my brother is

“still not found. He reminds me, I mean, I know you never forget your brother, but you know,”

having the dog that was your brother's, you know, your brother's dog, you never forget it's going through to five years and I won't let it go. The old adage is a squeaky will gets the oil and I won't stop.

call the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office at five six one six eight eight four thousand.

“Or you can submit an anonymous tip with crime stoppers of Palm Beach County through their website”

at crime stoppers pbc.com.

The deck is an audio-check production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the

“deck in our advocacy work visit thedeckpodcast.com. I think Chuck would approve.”

Every story has layers and sometimes the truth hides in plain sight. I'm Josh Dean,

host of chameleon, the podcast about people who transform, deceive and survive. From

“con artists to unbelievable yet true occurrences, we dive into stories where nothing is ever”

quite as it seems. Because to understand the world, you sometimes have to change the way you see it. Listen to chameleon wherever you get your podcasts.