I'll Take Care of This: The Disappearance of Brian Carrick

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

March 18, 2026

Brian C. Carrick was 17 years old, the eleventh of fourteen children in an Irish Catholic family, when he walked into Val's Finer Foods in Johnsburg, Illinois, on the evening of December 20, 2002, and never walked back out. It was the last day before Christmas break, an ordinary errand to ask a coworker about swapping a shift, and it ended with a pool of his own blood found in the store's produce cooler and a case that would take more than a decade to work its way through the Illinois court system, only to end without answers, without a body, and ultimately without a conviction that held.

A Familiar Face at Work

Brian had worked as a stock boy at Val's Finer Foods for roughly three years by the time he disappeared, a job that made him a familiar presence in a store his own community shopped at regularly. On the evening of December 20, his father William watched him leave the family home and head toward the store, hoping to arrange a shift swap for the following Saturday. He arrived at the store around 6:45 p.m. He was never seen again.

A Mother's Empty Bed

The following morning, Brian's mother Terry discovered his bed empty and undisturbed, and when he failed to show up for his scheduled shift at Val's, she contacted the Johnsburg Police Department on December 21 to report him missing. Investigators who responded to the store found signs that something violent had occurred inside the produce cooler, including a pool of roughly half a liter of watery blood, later confirmed through DNA testing to belong to Brian. Additional traces of his blood were found on boxes inside a compactor located behind the store. Brian's body itself was never recovered, then or at any point in the more than two decades since. On New Year's Day 2003, more than a thousand people attended a prayer vigil held in his honor, a turnout that spoke to just how deeply his disappearance had shaken the small community around him.

A Debt Over Marijuana

The case remained without an arrest for years, until 2010, when Mario Casciaro, whose family held partial ownership of the Val's Finer Foods store, was arrested and charged with an unusually rare legal theory, murder by intimidation, a charge that did not require prosecutors to prove Casciaro had physically killed Brian himself, only that his actions set in motion the events that led to Brian's death. Central to the case against him was testimony that Brian had been selling marijuana and had run up a debt of somewhere between 400 and 500 dollars with Casciaro, who prosecutors alleged was the one supplying the drugs in the first place.

The Witness Who Threw the Punch

The prosecution's case rested heavily on testimony from Shane Lamb, another employee at the store, who told jurors that Casciaro had directed him to confront Brian in the produce cooler over the unpaid debt. According to Lamb's original account, he struck Brian hard enough to knock him unconscious, at which point Casciaro allegedly told him to leave, saying he would take care of the rest himself. Prosecutors described Lamb's role in the alleged confrontation as that of hired muscle, a henchman used by Casciaro to intimidate a seventeen year old employee into paying what he owed.

Three Trials to Get a Conviction

The case against Casciaro did not move smoothly through the courts. His first trial, held in 2012, ended in a mistrial after jurors deadlocked eleven to one in favor of conviction. Prosecutors tried again, and in March 2013, after what amounted to Casciaro's third attempt at trial when earlier proceedings are counted, a McHenry County jury found him guilty of first degree murder by intimidation. He was sentenced to 26 years in prison and sent to serve his term at Menard Correctional Facility.

A Star Witness Recants Everything

Casciaro had served approximately 22 months of that sentence when the case took its most dramatic turn. Shane Lamb, the witness whose testimony had done more than anyone else's to secure the conviction, recanted his entire account, first in a signed affidavit and then publicly on a national news program. Lamb told ABC News that every part of his original story was false, describing it as something arranged by the state's attorney's office rather than an account of anything he had actually witnessed or done. He said that both he and Casciaro had nothing to do with whatever actually happened to Brian. Lamb explained that at the time he gave his original testimony, he had been facing a cocaine charge that carried a potential twelve year sentence, and that prosecutors had offered him immunity from any culpability in Brian's death, along with a reduced sentence on his own drug charge, in exchange for testifying against Casciaro.

The Conviction Falls Apart

Acting in part on the strength of this recantation and a broader review of the evidence presented at trial, the Second District Appellate Court of Illinois unanimously overturned Casciaro's murder conviction in September 2015, ruling that the evidence supporting his guilt had been so lacking and so improbable that the state had failed to meet its burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Casciaro was released after serving those 22 months, and the McHenry County State's Attorney's Office petitioned the Illinois Supreme Court to hear a further appeal of that reversal. The state's highest court declined to take up the case in March 2016, closing the door on any further prosecution and leaving Casciaro a free man. In the years since, Casciaro has gone on to pass the bar exam and practice as an attorney himself, and he sought a certificate of innocence in 2017 as part of an effort to formally clear his name beyond the simple reversal of his conviction.

Aftermath and Lingering Consequences

The fallout from Lamb's recantation did not end with Casciaro's release. In 2017, Lamb filed his own civil suit against members of the McHenry County State's Attorney's Office, the Johnsburg police chief, and the city of Johnsburg itself, alleging that his rights had been violated in connection with the 2010 agreement under which he had originally agreed to testify against Casciaro. The McHenry County state's attorney's office later settled a related suit over how the original charges in Brian's case had been pursued.

Parents Who Never Got Their Answer

Brian's parents did not live to see any resolution to their son's case, however incomplete that resolution ultimately proved to be. His mother Terry died in 2009, having described the not knowing as an empty hole in her heart that would never be filled. His father William died in 2014, expressing a wish for justice to be served while also acknowledging, in his own words, that justice was not really what life came down to in the end. The former prosecutor who handled the case, Michael Combs, later said his greatest regret was never being able to get the information needed to lead the Carrick family to Brian's remains.

Still Unsolved

More than two decades after Brian Carrick left home to ask about a shift swap at the grocery store where he worked, his case remains entirely unsolved. No one has ever been convicted of anything connected to his death, his body has never been found, and the one man who was convicted, and who served nearly two years in prison before his conviction unraveled, has gone on to build an entirely new life as a lawyer. Somewhere between a produce cooler that held traces of a seventeen year old's blood and a witness who says he lied about everything, the truth of what happened to Brian Carrick on the last evening before Christmas break in 2002 remains exactly where it has been for more than twenty years: unknown.

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