The Man Who Took Him From School: The Disappearance of Michael Hughes

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

June 27, 2026

On September 12, 1994, a man armed with a gun forced his way into Indian Meridian Elementary School in Choctaw, Oklahoma, held staff at gunpoint, and forced a six-year-old first grader named Michael Hughes and the school's principal into the principal's own pickup truck. He tied the principal to a tree in nearby woods and drove off with Michael. The principal was found alive hours later. Michael was never seen again. The man responsible, Franklin Delano Floyd, was not a stranger acting on impulse. He was the same man who had abducted Michael's own mother when she was a child decades earlier, forcing her to live under a series of false identities for the rest of her short life, a horror story that connected two generations of the same family long before Michael himself ever disappeared.

A Mother Who Was Never Who She Said She Was

Michael's mother was born Suzanne Marie Sevakis on September 6, 1969. As a young child, she was abducted by Franklin Floyd, who forced her over the following years to live under a series of fabricated identities, including the names Sharon Marshall and later Tonya Dawn Tadlock, also recorded in some records as Tonya Hughes. Suzanne spent essentially her entire life after that abduction unaware, or unable to reveal, who she truly was, existing under Floyd's control and his invented cover stories. She died in April 1990 in Oklahoma City, in what was recorded at the time as a hit-and-run accident but which investigators would later come to regard as deeply suspicious given everything else connected to Floyd. Her true identity, the fact that she had once been a real, named child abducted decades earlier and not simply a woman who had always gone by an assumed name, was not confirmed through DNA testing until 2014, years after both she and her son had already met tragic ends.

Michael's Early Life

Michael Anthony Hughes was born March 21, 1988, in Tampa, Florida, to Suzanne while she was living under the alias Tonya Dawn Tadlock. DNA testing conducted later confirmed that Franklin Floyd, despite having presented himself as Michael's father, was not actually his biological parent. After Suzanne's death in the 1990 hit-and-run, Michael entered the foster care system and was placed with Merle and Ernest Bean, who cared for him for nearly four years. According to the Beans' own accounts, Michael initially showed limited muscle control and was non-verbal when he first came into their care, but made significant developmental progress during the years he spent with them, finally beginning to build something resembling a stable, ordinary childhood after the chaos and trauma that had defined his earliest years.

September 12, 1994

That stability ended abruptly on September 12, 1994. Franklin Floyd, armed with a gun, forced his way into Indian Meridian Elementary School in Choctaw, Oklahoma, where Michael was attending first grade. He held school officials at gunpoint and forced both Michael and the school's principal, James Davis, into Davis's own pickup truck. Floyd then tied Davis to a tree in a wooded area and drove away with Michael. Passersby found Davis still restrained and alive several hours later. Michael was gone.

Arrested Two Months Later

Floyd was arrested roughly two months later, in November 1994, in Kentucky. He was charged federally with kidnapping and ultimately sentenced to more than fifty years in prison. In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, Floyd offered shifting and false accounts of Michael's whereabouts, at various points claiming the boy was living abroad or residing somewhere in Georgia or Missouri, none of which investigators were ever able to verify, and none of which turned out to be true.

A Confession Twenty Years Later

For roughly two decades, Michael's actual fate remained unknown, with Floyd offering nothing resembling a real confession from behind bars. That changed in 2014, when FBI agents Scott Lobb and Nate Furr reopened the investigation and began a new round of prison interviews with Floyd. During those interviews, Floyd finally admitted what had happened, telling investigators that he had shot Michael twice in the back of the head, in his own words, to make it real quick. He told agents that he had buried Michael's remains near the last interstate exit before crossing from Oklahoma into Texas along Interstate 35. Acting on that information, the FBI conducted an extensive search in 2015, covering roughly 2,000 feet of the area Floyd had described, working alongside forensic anthropologists from the University of Oklahoma. The search turned up nothing. Investigators have since suggested that if Michael's remains were indeed left in that area as described, wild animals may have scattered or consumed them long before any search was ever conducted, leaving nothing behind for anyone to recover.

Girl in the Picture

The full, tangled story connecting Franklin Floyd, Suzanne Sevakis, and Michael Hughes reached a much wider audience in 2022, when Netflix released a documentary titled Girl in the Picture, examining the case in depth and featuring interviews with the FBI agents who had worked to finally piece together Suzanne's true identity and confirm what had happened to her son. The documentary brought new public attention to a story that, for decades, had existed mostly within true crime circles and law enforcement files, introducing a much broader audience to the full scope of what Floyd had done across multiple decades and to multiple generations of the same family.

Floyd's Death

Franklin Floyd was separately linked to other violent crimes over the course of his life, including the 1989 murder of a woman named Cheryl Ann Commesso, and remained a person of interest in the still-unresolved circumstances surrounding Suzanne's own 1990 death. He died in prison on January 23, 2023, at the age of 79, having spent his final years incarcerated for Michael's kidnapping without ever facing a homicide charge specifically connected to the boy's murder, since prosecutors were never able to recover a body to support one.

Still Missing

Michael Anthony Hughes remains classified as missing, despite his kidnapper's own confession to killing him decades after the fact. His case sits at an unusual intersection of resolution and unresolved grief: investigators know, in Floyd's own words, what happened to Michael and roughly where his remains were left, yet nearly a decade after that confession, and more than thirty years after he was taken from his own elementary school at gunpoint, Michael has still never actually been found and brought home.

The Beans, who had raised Michael for nearly four years and watched him grow from a nonverbal, physically fragile toddler into an increasingly confident little boy, were left with nothing more than the same confession the rest of the public eventually received, a set of directions to a stretch of interstate roadside that ultimately yielded no remains at all. For a family that had already absorbed the shock of losing him once at the school, the 2014 confession offered a grim kind of certainty about what had happened without ever offering the far more basic comfort of an actual burial. Michael's case remains open with the FBI and the Oklahoma authorities who investigated it, a reminder that a confession, even a detailed one, is not always the same thing as an ending.

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