The Deck - Daniel Traina (8 of Diamonds, Florida)

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Our card this week is Daniel Traina, the 8 of Diamonds from Florida. 49-year-old Daniel Traina was hard to miss.  The Six-foot-four happy-go-lucky guy was always bopping 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-Eleven next to Florida’s busy Federal Highway … and vanished into the sticky, humid night… leaving behind NO clues.  And as investigators have tried to retrace Daniel’s final movements and work their way through those closest to him, the case has taken on a distinctly South Florida feel. An ocean-side town, a 7-Eleven 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?  If you know anything that can help the Traina family get answers about what happened to Daniel, call the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office at [phone]. Or you can submit an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers of Palm Beach County through their website at crimestoppersPBC.com.   View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/daniel-traina Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media. Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuck Twitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuck Facebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllc To support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers.  Instagram: @ashleyflowers TikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkie Twitter: @Ash_Flowers Facebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our card this week is Daniel Trayna, the Eight of Diamonds from Florida. 49-year-old Daniel Trayna was hard to miss. The 6'4-happy-go-lucky guy was always bopping 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-Eleven next to Florida's busy federal highway and vanished into the sticky human night, leaving behind no clues. And this day and age with electronics,

I mean, how could something like this happen? With cameras everywhere. I mean, it just baffles my mind. And as investigators have tried to retrace Daniel's final movements and work their way through those closest to him, the case has taken on a distinctly South Florida feel, an Oceanside Town, a 7-Eleven 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 Trayna 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, Dan was missing. Dan was his beloved younger brother, Daniel, who just turned 49 earlier that week. I was like, what do you mean he's missing? I just talked to him for his birthday. She goes, no, he's missing.

His roommate called the police and said he's missing personal support, hasn't seen him for four days. I was like, well, that's a pie. I talked to him on his birthday. The first thing I did is called my brother. I called both phone lines. Went to voicemail. I reached out via email. I reached out via text message.

I reached out via Facebook. I reached out X. Every other avenue, social media avenue I had with him, Instagram, trying to get over you at. 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, I didn't know what that meant. I just knew that baby brother was coming. Are you ready for your baby brother? And 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 come he can't get up? How come he 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 throughout our lives, basketball. sports, girls, everything.

We were around. He was always following me. That was a lot bigger than him. So I was always to protect him. I was a big brother. He would say somebody's picking on him in school. And I would go to the school and beat somebody up or threaten somebody. They'd leave him alone.

The boy's father was a contractor. And the family moved to Boca Raton in the 80s, lured by Florida's real estate boom and the year-round sunny weather. He loved Florida. He got into paddleboard as he got older. But fishing was his love. love. He loved a fish. My dad had a boat. We used to go out 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 size 17 shoe. So I used to tease him all the time. So he was an L. We looked at him sideways because his feet were so big. He was so skinny. Daniel, when he was 18, 19, my dad only real estate company. He pivoted from construction to real estate. And so Daniel got his real estate license and started doing real estate rentals, things of that nature. And because my dad and all three of us are very similar, we butted heads. So it 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 Laxahatchie, about 40 minutes west of the Palm Beach coastline. It was there that they raised their three kids while Daniel worked from home. He'd work in his garage and tease 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 boxer shorts on the computer all day, clicking buttons and making more money than I was. But in 2008, Daniel filed for divorce from his wife. They sold the family home in Laxahatchie, and he eventually performed. purchased a new one closer to the water in a small West Palm suburb called Lake Park.

The house was a small, a little two-bedroom, one bathroom home, a thousand square feet. But it was his. He bought it, paid for cash. No mortgage to the house. I was very proud of that all the time living there. Right by the fishing spot, right 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, Anne-Marie. He was a mama's boy. He was the favorite.

My brother, when he was younger, he was a sickly kid. And so my mother always coddled him. And so even when he was divorced and got 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 knocked 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 him, you know, sheltered in place, but we had each other. He had nobody else but himself. And I think from there, and this was after he was paddleboarding, and he couldn't even do that, He was just those shut in place. He had to sit home is when he probably turned to drinking excessively. I didn't know because he hit it well.

Anytime you ever ask any of us, oh, we're fine. Even my dad, oh, he's not fine. We know we're not fine. We just don't talk about it because that's how we were erased. Just, you know, 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 at least 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 because look at me.

I'm not a skinny person. And so we'd always make sure we brought him food. Big seedy stuff that he'd lose to love. And we'd drop it off and 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 called my brother and say, hey, happy birthday.

I can't believe you're so old. You catch them to me joking around because 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 go to dinner. He goes, now, it's going to go out probably for a couple of drinks and 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 the VA and the SSI was paying his bills, and he was paying Daniel, I think, $500 a month to live in the room. I was okay, well, that's good, and he was disabled, veteran. I'm sure he's harmless, older guy. David and Desiret 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 11 a.m. and drove 75 miles south from their home in Sebastian to Daniel's place in Lake Park.

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. there were a bunch of people in the house I never met 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? They were on his couch, watching his TV, ACs on, you know, and the cable in the house because my brother was, you know, during the cancer culture 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 the stuff I was paying for on his TV, on his couch. And my brother's nowhere to be found. And they were acting 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 heard he was living there. And I was like, what? And I was like, both of them living there? Drew with Roy, what's going on, where my brother at, what happened? When's the last time he spoke to him? You know, why didn't you call sooner? You waited four days. You know, he started to mention, oh, he had a drug problem.

He owed people money. And, I mean, I heard all these different stories from him that I said, well, what are you doing here? He goes, well, I got street cred. Like, he was an old man. And so, yeah, at first he said he said he's a 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 goes, well, somebody came in and stole everything.

And I was like, what happened to the garage door? He goes, oh, I broke. So where's the piece is at? Roy would later tell detectives that he was a scrapper, as in someone who collects metal objects to sell at 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 29th. But the case wasn't a subject. signed a detective until June 3rd after David's call. Detective Milner, she got the preliminary case. She met with, you know, called 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, would he go somewhere, did he leave town? And they also, you know, would enter the house to see if there's anything left behind a note. 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.

The purpose of that search warrant was to utilize a process, which we call Blue Star, which is determines 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 bloody area using like bleach

you know a 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 used a special light to take the photos and that illuminates it if there's anything there or not Detective Weissman met with Roy himself. You know, get the story straight from the horse's mouth. And his story was pretty consistent.

He said that he'd last seen Daniel on the morning of May 25th 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. Roy 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 going to beat him up because he had slept with this guy's wife. According to the detective's 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 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 going to call back later. on that phone to see if anybody was there looking for. When detectives later accessed 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 6.30 p.m., Daniel went to his friend's house, Mike Carpanella'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 blackmail. There was no 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 Carpinella said that he seemed not, you know, 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. Cornelia Rowe, 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 one of the last night.

you were one of the last people to see him. Can you tell me about what happened, like where you saw him and how he was acting? He showed him at my house and board shorts, no shirt, no shoes. And he said somebody dropped him off a couple blocks and he ran there because he's a little sweaty, like him from water.

He's just talking crazy. He's just all over the place in conversation, you know? Uh-huh. Didn't stick him one kind of topic. He was going from here to there to there to there. Do you think he was better at the influence of anything? I don't know. I never did anything like that with him. I don't know. So did he mention anything about being scared of someone or anyone in his life that was giving him problems?

Well, he told me he had to use my phone because he left his phone with his 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. Detective subpoenaed Mike Carpinella's phone records, which showed that three calls were made from his phone to Daniels between 7-4-4-4-7-4-7-4-7-4-7-4-7-7-4-7-7-7-7-7. 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, end quote. But in our interview with Mike, he didn't mention anyone specific to us.

The only town thought it was weird if he didn't have his phone with him because he left you at the house. Mike's roommate, Chris Markovic, was also at the house. At 8.38 p.m., Daniel left in an Uber that Chris ordered for him. So we Uber to him out of here real quick. So he was just acting crazy. So we Uber to him out of here real quick. We Uber him to his house. Then we heard that the Uber went, stopped at 7-Eleven.

He was supposed to go home. Daniel then changed it to drop him off at 7-Eleven, which he did. We located the Uber driver who did pick up Daniel at the house and actually drive him. He told us that, you know, midway, you know, to Daniel's residence, Daniel had asked him, you know, hey, can you just drop me off at 7-Eleven? I want to grab something. Driver said, no problem. Dropped him off at 7-Eleven. Driver didn't notice anything suspicious at the 7-Eleven. No odd vehicles that stuck out to him. At the time, you know, driver said that Daniel got out of the car and went inside 7-Eleven 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 timestamp on it.

Detective Weissman told us that the footage from the three cameras that were working at the time appeared to have been captured somewhere between 8.30 p.m. and 9 p.m. Daniel goes into the 7-Eleven, tries to use his debit card at the ATM. 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 is seen walking out the front door of the 7-Eleven toward the gas pump area and disappears from view. Earlier in this story, Mike Carpinella 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-Eleven, they lose him completely, at least visually. There were no cameras from the 7-Eleven that were operational in the leaving the store toward the gas pump area. The 7-Eleven 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-Eleven employee spoke with investment.

He said there was nothing out of the ordinary about Daniel's appearance or demeanor that night. The clerk remembered the car not working. He said he walked out the front door and he didn't pay attention. He didn't see him go, you know, in speaking with anybody in the parking lot or getting into a car, nothing that he saw. Detectives canvassed the businesses and homes between the 7-Eleven and Daniel's house. And they found a couple of residences that had secure. security cameras, but there were 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-Eleven. Approximately an hour later, after Daniel had left the store, his ATM card was, tried to be used at a 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-Eleven 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-Eleven 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 about 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? That 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 tried to piece everything together, a picture, a picture of him. emerged of someone who was struggling in ways that may have made him vulnerable.

It was obvious that Daniel was suffering for money problems, and he was kind of spiraling downhill, you know, on the way to rock bottom as far as the alcohol and some of the drug use that we learned from people, you know, 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 roommates. His house may have been paid off, but he still had bills to pay. And he wasn't generating income from work because Daniel had also recently lost his email

marketing job. They want to let him go during the COVID stuff. I don't know it's because of him drinking and not being able to do his metrics for email marketing or it was because of COVID or a combination of both. So he lost his job there. David says 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 9th when Detective Weissman 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, you know, who he described as, you know, sex workers and, you know, narcotic users. Investigators learned from Roy and others they spoke with that Daniel was seeing several women. So they had to ask, were 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, you know, the relationship with Shawanda and Daniel was kind of, you know, toxic. Shawanda, you know, had slapped Daniel in front of Roy before. She had stayed at the house as well with Daniel for periods of time. And then eventually Daniel made her leave the residence because of, You know, the relationship wasn't working out. You know, Roy also stated that Shawanda would have people come over, you know, and there was some drug sales out of the house and bringing a crowd that Daniel didn't want to the residents,

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 any of. 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 Richna Nicholas. Talking with Roy, we learned that Richna 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, you know, 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 timing 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. Richner was cooperative with us in the investigation. Didn't try to hide anything. I mean, she was quite helpful. She also found it odd that Daniel would invite Roy Smith and his uncle in. 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.

So she seemed kind of concerned about it. We tried calling and texting, Richna, to see if she would speak more about Daniel and the case. But 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 John Bro. In the message John Bro had told Daniel, you mess with my girl. I'm going to kill you.

This message from John Bro 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 John Bro. Except they didn't know who John Bro 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 stonewalled 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 Bo Dietl's office at a New York City. Bo Dietl's, you know, they're a movie star, a PI firm at a New York City. They're not cheap. So his friends put together about $10,000 and got that office to look into the case. Carlo Catoño 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, you have people that have things that they want to hide or they had bad experience, with investigators or the police in the past. So a lot of the rapport building needs to come in and say, you know, we're looking for Dan Trainor.

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 into. We're dressed in a casual kind of mode. I don't have a badge. I don't have a gun. I come at them like a person.

You know, and I'm working for family. I'm working for loved ones of someone that something happened to that we're trying to get answers to. We're not looking to prosecute them. We're not looking to turn them in. 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. least before. Richelma 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. He had nowhere to live.

So I think in his mind, he thought, wow, I'm just going to take over his Daniel, just live in this house. It's bought and paid for him. 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 Trayna thinks detectives should have pressed Roy harder. But anytime I told that the police officer,

Roy's been nothing but fantastic. He's answered every question voluntarily without an attorney. I was like, well, he can't afford an attorney. How's he going to have an attorney? We were unable to locate Roy for comment, and his uncle, Sam Perry, passed away recently. We asked Detective Weissman 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 led us to believe that they did anything to Daniel.

They seemed to believe his story, that Daniel left and when he did, 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 Weissman and his partner went to the Palm Beach Sheriff's office county jail and interviewed John Bro. His real name was John Lee Smith. 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 with her and 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, he was a pint size. So, you know, I don't think nothing came to fruition as far as, you know, looking at John Smith is a hardcore suspect. Alina, the woman at the center of the argument, was identified as Alina DiMarchie.

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. Apparently she was pregnant with my brother's twins at one time. They were engaged to each other from what I understand. She had a miscarriage.

And they were together off and on, 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 asked her 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 wander 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 Daniel's ATM card after he was seen leaving 7-Eleven. Somebody obviously met Daniel at that 7-Eleven or close by. and took him to the ATM way up the road. We actually physically have Daniel seen as his last point, you know, on camera walking out of the 7-Eleven.

We have him leaving there. But we have his ATM card used, you know, 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, don't. He would never leave that house, first off. 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 to 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. I hope they're able to see this and see that I'm not going to give up, you know, 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 Daniel. He walks up to him and looks at him all the time. And then when he get there, he realizes it's not him. But he always looks for him. I know that. This is the last, you know, piece of my brother that I have left is really him.

It's Toby. A reminder every day that my brother is still not found. He reminds me. I mean, you never forget your brother, but, you know, have a reminder. the dog that was your brother's, you know, your brother's dog, you never forget. It's going for five years and I won't let it go. The old adage is a squeaky wheel gets the oil and I won't stop. If you know anything that can help the train of family get answers about what happened to Daniel,

call the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office at 561-688-4,000. 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 chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck in our advocacy work, visit the deckpodcast.com.

I think Chuck would approve.