Nine months have painfully passed since Harker Heights resident Sarah Holley last saw her missing brother Michael Havekost in Killeen. As the clock ticks towards the one-year anniversary of his disappearance, Holley worries when or if she’ll ever find her lost brother.
Michael Havekost, 52, was last seen at the Day N Night Inn at 6200 East Veterans Memorial Blvd. in Killeen on Sept. 4.
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When Havekost was laid off from his job during the pandemic, Holley said she stepped in to help her brother pay for a place to stay. She said she purchased a hotel room at the Day N Night Inn in Killeen where he comfortably lived for months prior to his disappearance.
“It was weird because I’d go every Monday to pay for the next week, and he’d been there long enough that he knew the owners, I knew the owners,” she said. “I went there on Sept. 7, that Monday, to pay, and he didn’t come to the door. I thought, ‘Oh, maybe he can’t hear me, he’s in the shower.’”
Holley said she paid for the week and left the hotel, but as days went by she had a feeling something was wrong.
“So I came back on Monday, Sept. 14, and they (the hotel owners) said they hadn’t seen him that whole week,” she said.
After not seeing or hearing from her brother, Holley filed a missing person report on Sept. 14.
The Killeen Police Department searched his hotel room the day she filed the report, Holley said, but didn’t find any signs of foul play.
“I was scared something happened in the room,” she said. “All of his stuff was in there. It didn’t look like there was a struggle. The few things he owned were there, even his hearing aids that he wears and his wallet were there. It almost looked like someone knocked on the door, something happened, and he was gone.”
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“The best case scenario is that he’s homeless somewhere,” she said. “But I just can’t believe that he wouldn’t take his wallet with him.”
Holley is asking the public to keep an eye out for her big brother in hopes he is still somewhere in or around Killeen.
“I want him to know he can come back no matter what happened,” she said. “If something happened and he’s scared or nervous that I’d be upset, I want him to know everything would be OK.”
Havekost is described as being 5 feet, 8 inches tall, weighing 160 pounds, with bald or very short blond hair and hazel eyes. He wears prescription glasses and hearing aids.
