Every Day I Look: The Abduction of Baby Bryan Dos Santos-Gomes

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

January 1, 2026

Bryan Dos Santos-Gomes was just twenty eight days old on December 1, 2006, the infant son of Maria de Fatima Ramos Dos Santos, a Brazilian woman living in Fort Myers, Florida. He weighed twelve pounds and stood two feet tall, with black hair and brown eyes. That afternoon, Maria and her friend Janice Duarte were returning from a doctor's appointment with baby Bryan when a woman driving a dark colored SUV began following them, eventually pulling up and asking for directions. The encounter seemed ordinary enough at first, the kind of small roadside exchange that happens between strangers every day. It was not ordinary at all.

The woman gained enough of Maria and Janice's trust, or simply enough proximity, to get all three of them, Maria, Janice, and baby Bryan, into her vehicle. She drove them to an area known as Pine Manor, and there she produced a knife, threatening Maria and forcing her to remain in the vehicle while holding the infant. She then drove roughly fifteen miles to a church parking lot near the Villagio housing development off Three Oaks Parkway in Estero, Florida, where she forced Maria and Janice out of the SUV, instructed them to wait ten minutes before contacting anyone, and drove away with Bryan still inside the vehicle.

A Diaper Bag Already Packed

Investigators who examined the details of the abduction quickly concluded it had not been a spontaneous, opportunistic act. The suspect's vehicle reportedly already contained a diaper bag and a car seat, items that would have made little sense for a woman simply driving around on an ordinary afternoon, but that suggested someone who had planned in advance to leave that encounter with an infant in tow. The woman was described as Hispanic, somewhere between twenty eight and thirty years old at the time, heavyset, approximately five foot four, with straight black hair partially pinned up in a bun, wearing blue jeans and a black blouse, and speaking Spanish. She reportedly told Maria and Janice, during the time they spent together in the vehicle, that she herself had an eleven day old child named Jose Guadalupe, a detail investigators have never been able to confirm or connect to any actual birth record, but one that fits a theory some investigators have floated over the years, that the woman responsible may have recently suffered a miscarriage or stillbirth and taken Bryan in an attempt to fill that loss with a child of her own.

The vehicle itself was described as a black two door Ford Explorer or similar SUV from somewhere between 1998 and 2003, with visibly peeling window tint, a detail specific enough that investigators hoped it might eventually help identify either the vehicle or its owner. Detectives also recovered a voicemail message the suspect had left using Janice's phone at some point during the encounter, a message that included two separate calls placed to a business called Shore Irrigation, a detail suggesting the woman had some existing familiarity with that specific company, though it never led investigators directly to her identity.

From Human Trafficking Retaliation to a Random Crime

In the earliest days of the investigation, some theories centered on the possibility that the abduction was connected to human trafficking retaliation, given rumors and speculation swirling around the case at the time. Investigators have since moved away from that theory, coming to believe instead that the abduction was most likely a random crime committed by a woman driven by her own desire for a child rather than by any organized criminal motive connected to trafficking. That shift in theory has not brought investigators any closer to actually identifying who she was or where she and Bryan went after that afternoon in Estero.

A Case Reopened Nearly Twenty Years Later

For years, Bryan's case remained one of Florida's more haunting unsolved infant abductions, revisited periodically but without any significant new leads. That changed close to the case's twentieth anniversary, when Fort Myers Police detectives Richard Harasym and Mike Iarossi led a renewed push on the investigation, submitting physical evidence collected back in 2006 for modern DNA testing using techniques that did not exist at the time of the original abduction. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children worked with a forensic artist to release a new age progression image showing what Bryan might look like today, now nineteen years old, an entirely different face than the twenty eight day old infant his mother last held in her arms.

That renewed effort produced a genuine break. A tip originating from Tacoma, Washington gave investigators fresh reason to believe Bryan may currently be living somewhere in Washington State, quite possibly without any awareness of the circumstances surrounding his own infancy, raised his entire life under the assumption that the woman who took him was simply his mother. Detective Harasym has publicly asked anyone with information to come forward, while acknowledging that Bryan, or the woman who took him, could realistically be located anywhere, not only in Washington but potentially across the country or even internationally, with investigators noting specifically that any DNA Bryan himself might have submitted to a consumer ancestry website would trigger an alert connecting him back to his biological family.

A Mother Who Has Never Stopped Believing

Maria de Fatima Ramos Dos Santos has never stopped believing her son is alive, a conviction she has held onto every single day since 2006. She has spoken publicly about the anguish of that ongoing wait, saying plainly that she wants Bryan back every day, that she now has another child who is eighteen years old, the same age Bryan would be, and that she tells God every day, please, bring back Bryan. Asked directly whether she believed he was still alive despite the years of silence, she has answered with total certainty, saying he is going to come home, that he is not dead, and that she looks for him every single day regardless of what anyone else might assume after so much time has passed.

Bryan Dos Santos-Gomes would be nineteen years old today, a young man who has likely spent his entire life unaware that the family raising him is not the one he was born into. His case remains open and actively investigated by the Fort Myers Police Department, working in coordination with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, driven forward by a new lead out of the Pacific Northwest and by a mother in Florida who has never once let herself believe her son was gone for good.

Anyone with information about Bryan Dos Santos-Gomes is asked to contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678 or the Fort Myers Police Department at 239-321-7700.

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