Account
Jul 19, 2009
Mar 26, 2020
Jon
Dabkowski
53
11
58 inches
72 lbs
White / Caucasian
Male
On a cold winter evening in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, on January 14, 1982, 11-year-old Jon Dabkowski and his 10-year-old friend, Gabriel Minarcin, vanished without a trace. The two boys had just finished dinner at Jon's home and were making the short, familiar walk, just three doors down, to Gabriel's house to play. It was a journey they had made countless times before in the small, close-knit community. However, on this particular evening, they never arrived. Jon was last seen wearing a maroon and tan jacket, a red sweatshirt, jeans, boots, and a red and white tasseled cap. He was a Boy Scout who enjoyed football and baseball. The leading theory held by law enforcement is that the two friends may have wandered toward the nearby Allegheny River, a place they had been warned to avoid, and fallen through the ice. This hypothesis was supported by the discovery of two sets of small footprints in the snow that led to the riverbank but did not lead away. Investigators also found a hole in the ice near where a houseboat was moored. An extensive search of the river and the surrounding town was immediately launched, involving over 100 police officers, firefighters, and civilian volunteers, but yielded no clues as to the boys' whereabouts. Despite the footprints, Jon's family has always maintained that he was a dependable child who would have obeyed his parents' warnings to stay away from the river. Years turned into decades with no answers for the Dabkowski and Minarcin families. A strange and ultimately cruel twist in the case came in 1998 when a man named Neil Hammons was discovered to have stolen Jon's identity. For a brief, hope-filled period, Jon's family believed he had been found, but it was quickly revealed that Hammons had simply found Jon's information on a missing person's website and had no connection to his disappearance. The lack of any concrete evidence has left the case open and officially classified as a non-family abduction. The disappearance of Jon Dabkowski and Gabriel Minarcin remains an agonizing mystery for their families and the Tarentum community, a painful story of two young boys who set out to play on a winter night and were never seen again.
Jan 14, 1982
Tarentum
Pennsylvania
Allegheny County
No
25861
Tarentum Police Department
Tarentum
Pennsylvania
Allegheny County
15804
318 East 2nd Avenue, Pennsylvania
7242241515
Local
Law Enforcement
M98010
Tarentum Police Department
7166
Brown
Brown
Brown
05/31/2026
