Feb 11, 2016
The last time anybody remembers seeing Shawn Gallagher, he was standing outside Freeman Hospital West in Joplin, waiting for a van to take him to the Salem Alliance Recovery Center
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Shawn Gallagher
The last time anybody remembers seeing Shawn Gallagher, he was standing outside Freeman Hospital West in Joplin, waiting for a van to take him to the Salem Alliance Recovery Center in Kansas City.
His older brother’s girlfriend brought him a change of clothes and his medications for the trip.
She told his family and police that she called the driver who was to pick him up and he told her he was just 10 minutes out. She figured there was no sense in waiting around and left Shawn there.
“Somehow in that 10 minutes he just disappeared,” the missing man’s sister, Christine Johnston, of Yukon, Oklahoma, told the Globe in a telephone interview this week.
That was June 3, 2010. Gallagher was 40 years old, homeless and still struggling with addictions to methamphetamine and crack cocaine, a fight he’d been waging since he was a teen.
Johnston said the family never figured out that he was missing until a month later when the older brother, who lives in Joplin, and his girlfriend learned from the treatment center that he was gone when the van arrived at the hospital. The driver never found him. Gallagher never made the trip.
Joplin police were contacted, and a missing persons case was opened. Sgt. Trevor Duncan said officers working the case at the time made the rounds to the local homeless shelters, convenience stores and other haunts of Joplin’s street people, all to no avail. Everyone who knew him or recognized his photo had not seen him in about a month.
Since then, officers have checked out numerous leads, Duncan said.
“None of those leads have turned up any conclusive information as to where Mr. Gallagher is,” he said.
Johnston said the family has been to Joplin a few times looking for Gallagher, showing photos of him at the shelters. She and her husband recently scraped some reward money together and are hoping that may encourage someone to come forward with information that will provide the family some answers about what happened to her brother.
Besides his sister and his mother in Oklahoma City, Gallagher’s adult son and daughter have been left not knowing what happened to their father.
“We just miss him,” Johnston said. “We love him. We want to know what happened to him.”
The missing man’s family moved to Oklahoma from Pennsylvania when he was a child. He liked to draw as a child and grew up wanting to be an architect. His involvement with drugs curtailed those dreams, his sister said.
Her brother’s addiction problems are further complicated by his bipolar and schizoaffective disorders, Johnston said. He’s been on disability in the past and has more than once sought treatment for drug addiction. He moved to Joplin three years before he disappeared to enter a treatment program here, she said.
At first, Gallagher moved in with the older brother who lives in Joplin. But the brother was forced to kick him out when he relapsed into drug use and stole from him, Johnston said. Shawn had been living on the streets in Joplin for about a year when he vanished, she said.
“He’d go to my brother’s house and eat and take showers and stuff, and then he’d turn around and leave,” she said.
He had a girlfriend in Joplin for a while, but Johnston never met her and never learned her name.
Johnston’s and Gallagher’s mother, Shirley Smythwood, told the Globe in a phone interview that she still remains “worried sick” about her son more than five years after he went missing. The last time she saw him was the April before he disappeared when he returned home for Easter and a dinner with her and the family, she said.
“I could tell he was high,” Smythwood said. “But he was OK. He wasn’t bouncing off the walls or anything like that.”
She said she can’t help but fear he’s no longer alive.
”So then you think: What were his last minutes like?” she said. “Did he cry out for me? Did he cry out for God? I need to know what happened to him. A person can’t just fall off the face of the Earth and never be seen again.”
Reward
Shawn Gallagher’s family is offering a $2,000 reward for information leading to a determination of what happened to the homeless Joplin man.>>
