The Unsettling Disappearance and Death of Brandon Lawson
After a haunting 911 call, Brandon vanished
Brandon Mason Lawson
One of four children, Brandon Mason Lawson was born on November 18th, 1986, in Fort Worth, Texas, to parents Brad and Kimberly.
Brandon met Ladessa Lofton, his common-law wife, in high school and the couple went on to have three children together.
The hardworking and outdoorsy Brandon loved fishing and camping and was a devoted father. He worked long hours in the oil fields each week for a company called Renegade Well Services. However, he was set to begin a new job soon.
Brandon had a history of substance abuse, but he had been clean for around six months at the time of his disappearance.
The Night of the Disappearance
On the evening of August 8th, 2013, 26-year-old Brandon arrived home in San Angelo, Texas, and had an argument with Ladessa.
She later explained that the fight occurred partially because they were both stressed out due to Brandon working 60+ hour weeks and having three small children in the house. Another major factor in the argument was that Brandon hadn’t come home the night before and Ladessa believed this to be a sign that he was abusing drugs again.
Brandon and Ladessa had a policy for how to handle disagreements between them. When things became too heated, they’d go to separate rooms—or one would leave the home—and they’d give each other a chance to cool off before approaching the topic again.
He called his father around 11:30 p.m., told him what had happened, and said that he wanted to come over to his house. Brad Lawson, who lived approximately three hours away, in Crowley, Texas, tried to discourage his son from making the long drive, but Brandon insisted.
“For a long time I blamed myself,” said Ladessa, speaking of the regret she felt over what happened between them and that Brandon had left as a result.
“I will never get those words back,” she continued, still haunted by what would prove to be the final words she’d ever speak to her partner of 10 years.
Brandon Lawson left home in his silver Ford F-150 at 11:54 p.m. and would never return.
Brandon’s Mysterious Final Hours
He ran out of gas during the drive to Crowley and had to pull over on Route 277, between San Angelo and Bronte, Texas, in Coke County. He called his brother Kyle, who lived only a mile away from Brandon and Ladessa’s home, and asked him to bring gas.
While talking to Kyle, Brandon claimed that he was being chased by three men, whom he later described as “Mexicans in the neighborhood.” Kyle, dubious about the veracity of his story, asked him if he was on drugs and perhaps hallucinating, but Brandon denied this.
Kyle soon spoke to Ladessa on the phone and told her what was going on. She put a fuel container out for him to pick up and started to get ready for bed.
Kyle, his wife Audrey, and their four-year-old child came over and retrieved it. Kyle was short on money at the time and couldn’t afford to fill it up, so the plan was to pick up Brandon, drive him to a service station, and have him pay to fill the canister.
They drove to the location and found Brandon’s truck parked on the side of the road, but Brandon himself was nowhere to be found.
A sheriff’s deputy showed up a short time later after being contacted by a trucker, who reported that Brandon’s vehicle was parked just over the white line along the edge of the highway and was obstructing traffic.
During a call, Brandon told Kyle, “I can see you. I’m right here.” Yet neither Kyle nor the deputy could see him.
When he still hadn’t shown up after several minutes, Kyle initially thought that he might be hiding from the officer, because he had recently learned that there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest, related to drug charges issued in Johnson County back in 2005.
However, as Brandon’s later 911 call would suggest, this was likely not the reason for his disappearance.
Timeline of Cellphone Calls
Many phone calls were made to and from Brandon Lawson’s phone that night, several of which either couldn’t be completed or dropped while in progress due to the poor cell reception in the area.
This is a timeline of those calls, reconstructed from both phone records and the accounts of Brandon’s family:
11:30 p.m.—Brandon called his father Brad.
11:54 p.m.—Brandon left to head to his father’s house.
12:30 a.m.—Brandon phoned his brother Kyle and told him that he ran out of gas and pulled over on Route 277. During this call, Brandon claimed he was being chased by “Mexicans in the neighborhood.”
12:50 a.m.—Brandon called 911 (more on the details of this call soon).
12:51 a.m.—Kyle called Brandon and left a voicemail.
12:51 a.m.—Brandon called Ladessa but received no response because her phone was still in her car.
12:52 a.m.—Brandon called Audrey, Kyle’s wife, and said, “Audrey, Audrey, I’m bleeding.” These were the last known words spoken by Brandon.
12:54 a.m.—Kyle called Brandon.
12:57 a.m.—Brandon called a neighbor.
12:58 a.m.—Brandon called Kyle.
12:59 a.m.—Kyle called Brandon.
1:04 a.m.—The 911 dispatcher called Brandon in an attempt to get more information about his location. She received no response and left a voicemail.
1:09 a.m.—Brandon called Kyle three times.
1:15 a.m.—Brandon called Kyle twice. These were the final calls made from his phone.
1:19 a.m.—From this point on, all calls made to Brandon’s phone went directly to voicemail.
911 Call Transcript
Brandon’s cryptic 911 call became the subject of much debate over the years. It’s difficult to discern exactly what Brandon said during this phone call or what was going on in the background.
The following transcript is just one of several different interpretations of the call:
Operator: 911 Emergency.
Brandon: Yes I’m in the middle of a field, if they could just bring some guys over. Right here going towards Abilene on Bronte side. My truck ran out of gas. There’s one car here and guys chasing me into the woods. Please hurry!
Operator: Okay, now run that by me one more—
Brandon: I tried talking to ‘em. I totally ran into them.
Operator: Ahh, you ran into him. Okay.
Brandon: Just the first guy.
[noise]
Brandon: I got shot.
Operator: Do you need an ambulance?
Brandon: Yeah. No, I need the cops.
Operator: Okay. Is anybody hurt?
[noises]
Operator: Hello? … Hello? Hello?
Brandon: (very faintly) Help me.
Some observers believe the noises indicated in the transcript were gunshots, while others think it was just vehicles crossing the bridge over the nearby river. The true source and nature of the sounds have remained a mystery.
Additionally, as previously stated, the 911 operator did attempt to call Brandon back, but received no response and left a voicemail instead. It’s unknown why he didn’t answer her call—unless the poor cell reception was to blame again—since we know that he went on to place several other calls afterward.
Some also believe that they can hear another individual speaking in the background.
In the slowed-down version of the call, it does sound as if there is a third voice speaking, who can faintly be heard saying things like “Get up” and “Protect yourself.”
A Fruitless Search
Brandon’s family continued to search for him until the morning, but found nothing. There were no further calls from Brandon and he seemed to have vanished into thin air.
Law enforcement initially assumed that Brandon was hiding and may have been on the run because of his outstanding warrant. However, this doesn’t seem plausible considering that he specifically asked for cops to be sent during his conversation with the 911 responder.
Ladessa and the rest of Brandon’s family conducted another search. They looked everywhere they could in the area, but were hampered in their efforts by local landowners who refused to allow them to search on their land. Ladessa also paid to have a plane aid in the search.
Not a shred of evidence was discovered to explain what had happened to Brandon Lawson.
In the following days, deputies conducted their own small-scale search but didn’t find a body or a human heat signature.
Tom Green County Sheriff Nick Hanna, who was a Texas Ranger and the lead investigator at the time, believed Brandon’s body was probably in the desolate desert area off U.S. 277, which was “largely inhabited by rattlesnakes and feral hogs.”
Honing in on this section of the grid, Hanna focused his searches in Bronte, utilizing “two DPS helicopters, ATVs, TEXSAR, six cadaver dogs, and four different agencies.”
Search teams still didn’t find any trace of Brandon.
“The only sign of anyone being in that area was a spot under a tree where it appeared someone sat down close to the roadway within eyesight of where Lawson’s pickup broke down,” a report stated.
Despite the lack of progress, Brandon’s family never gave up hope that they would one day find him.
Theories
The strange and mysterious circumstances of Brandon’s disappearance inspired a number of theories.
Drug-induced Hallucination
Kyle later revealed that Brandon had relapsed and started using meth again shortly before he went missing.
With that in mind, many have suggested that he may have been high and hallucinating the night he disappeared and that he either succumbed to the elements or injuries incurred while traversing rough terrain in the middle of the night.
It’s also been theorized that he may have been attacked by an animal—perhaps wild hogs known to inhabit the region.
Murder
This theory posits that Brandon had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—that he witnessed something he wasn’t meant to and was murdered for it. Proponents of this theory point to what sounds like gunshots and the voices of one or more unknown people in the background of his 911 call, combined with Brandon’s own claim that he was being chased by men.
He Ran Away
Early in the investigation, police believed that Brandon left town of his own free will to start over elsewhere and dodge his arrest warrant.
A piece of information that seemed to bolster this theory was that he had evidently cashed in his 401(k) shortly before vanishing. However, Ladessa was unaware of whether or not he had received the money yet.
His family never believed that he ran off. They felt certain that he wouldn’t have chosen to leave the children whom he loved so much. Additionally, the arrest warrant reportedly wasn’t a big deal to him—certainly not serious enough to make him abandon his family—and was in fact something that he had been working to rectify.
According to Ladessa:
“Brandon would never run from his kids and while he had an outstanding warrant, we were in the process of saving to pay his fine and addressing it through our lawyer.”
It’s also important to note that there has been no further activity on Brandon’s bank accounts or Social Security Number (SSN) since he vanished.
While Brad Lawson also didn’t believe that his son had willingly left, he wasn’t entirely convinced that Brandon died in or near the field that was his last known location either.
“There’s nowhere to go out there. Pitch-dark, one in the morning, his cellphone dies so he had no flashlight. It’s rocky cactus terrain out there. If he had fell down or something, we would have found him in the search. Nobody has showed me Brandon. If they would, I’d go get him and I’d put him where he belongs: with his family. But until that day, I’m not giving up hope.”
Interestingly, Brandon’s phone last pinged (at 1:19 a.m.) three miles away from his truck, leading some to wonder if he could have been picked up by a passing motorist.
2023 Update
On February 4th, 2022, Brandon Lawson’s family announced that a search party had found what they believed to be Brandon’s clothing near his last known location.
“I had a search team that’s close to me, led by advocate Jason Watts,” Ladessa told Oxygen. “And he led a search team. It was really cold there, about 10 [searchers], and they found his shoes and his shorts.”
Shortly thereafter, the Texas Rangers conducted their own search of the area and discovered human remains.
The DNA results are still pending, but his loved ones strongly believe that the remains belong to Brandon and that they’re one step closer to learning what happened to him on that August night so many years ago.
Ladessa shared her feelings about the discovery:
“We feel in our hearts it’s him. We feel like, who else could it be? He wouldn’t leave his family. Brandon wasn’t that type of person.”
An update in June 2023 announced that the remains are still unidentified due to the advanced state of decomposition and having little to work with in terms of DNA analysis. Two different labs so far have been unable to extract enough DNA for testing. The Texas Rangers are currently exploring other options,
2024 Update - Brandon’s Remains are Identified
On December 24th, 2024, Ladessa announced that the remains had finally been positively identified as Brandon’s.
"We finally get to bring Brandon home. I just want to thank all of you from the bottom of our heart. That helped with calling and sharing even praying for us during these difficult time."
While his cause of death remains unknown, as well as what truly happened to him that night, at least one part of the mystery has been solved, bringing with it some measure of resolution, and giving his loved ones the ability to give him a proper resting place.