Also, he'd apparently said "You would be fine without me" to Jackie one day prior to his leaving, not "Promise you'll go on without me" as reported elsewhere. Slightly different, although I don't know anything regarding the context of that conversation.
RSBM
Thank you for clarifying
@Orange And Purple. I first saw SK's case on a national online news outlet tonight. So your family's hard work at getting the word out is having an impact.
I have caught up on this thread. I want to first acknowledge how terrifying this must be for you, your family, and SK. I don't have much to add here, as many great minds have already contributed a lot. But I do have two recurring thoughts as I digest what we know so far, to some degree based on past WS cases.
1. Could SK's emotional stress, delusions, paranoia have triggered a
Dissociative Fugue State, in which he could have entered a state of amnesia, not recognized anyone in the vacation unit, including his family, left abruptly and is now wandering and traveling with a different identity? That could be consistent with
@Simply Southern's ideas. The case that is mentioned in the Wiki link, above, and also here on WS is
Hannah Upp. She disappeared in 2017 from the U.S. Virgin Islands right before a hurricane struck the area. Her prior fugue states found her in water and so it is feared she went swimming and drowned, perhaps due to the incoming storm. I am not a psychologist, so this is conjecture on my part. It's just an idea that SK may not know who he is and could be going by a different name as he wanders.
2. Even with your clarification of SK's statement to Jackie, the day before he left, "You'll be fine without me", I still go to the possibility that SK may have decided to end his mental anguish in the nearby ocean. Given Ernesto's fierce effects on the eastern shore of the U.S., with strong rip tides, and the
two Ohio men who separately drowned off Hilton Head the same day SK disappeared, he may have been taken out to sea in a rip tide. And from the updates Jackie has posted we've learned that before this trip, SK had no trepidation about the ocean. So perhaps he saw it as a way out that day. And sadly the WS case that comes to mind in this context is
Susan McLean. She was a middle-aged woman from the U.S. vacationing with her husband and teen sons (IIRC) in Scotland, who wandered from their lodge and was found deceased by suicide in the woods.
This may be of no use to your family's search for SK, but in the spirit of sleuthing to help, I share. All IMO of course. That said, I sure hope SK is found alive soon.