Father won't give up the search for his missing son
By Nancy Needham nancy@theacorn.com

It has been six months since Jeffrey Scott Howard, 40, disappeared, and still no one has seen a trace of him or his car. Both went missing at around 2:30 a.m. Dec. 21.

His wife, Thue Howard, said that was the last time she saw him. He told her he had a headache as she rested with their newborn daughter sleeping nearby. When she awoke at around 5 a.m., her husband was gone, along with a burgundy 2003 Hyundai Elantra, from their home at the 1800 block of Avenida de Las Flores.

His father, Stan Howard of Arizona, said he left with about $80 in his wallet and without a cellphone he usually would be carrying. No one knows where to look, so the police, family and friends have been searching everywhere they can think of, but after six months they are running out of ideas.

"We've driven over 7,000 miles retracing where he grew up," his father said.

They have given posters to police in California, Arizona and Nevada, and nothing has turned up, he said.

"It is frustrating without any clues," Howard said.

Police are storing DNA, dental records and fingerprints at the FBI's National Crime Information Center in case he turns up at a hospital or somewhere and needs to be identified.

Detectives have been tracking his ATM and credit cards, and there has been no activity on them. They have also talked with those who knew him and ran a forensic test on his computer.

At one point the family hired a psychic because they saw no other avenues to go down. Since then, they have given up on that, his father said.

"The psychic's information was so general we couldn't even pinpoint it to a city or town," he said.

His father remembers when he was a minister in the 1960s when distraught parents from the Midwest would send him posters with pictures of their missing children for him to put up around the California town he served in where the hippie movement was popular.

He felt compassion for them and did his best to help, he remembered, never thinking he could someday be among those suffering from the loss of a child.

"We're hoping someone will accidentally find the car and we will know where to look," he said.

Before he disappeared, his father, who lives in Arizona, did not notice anything that made him worry about his son, he said.

"We communicated over the Internet a few days before he disappeared, and he was very upbeat.

"He was waiting to find out if he passed his real estate exam, which we knew he would because he is very bright and had gotten a 97 on the test he'd taken before, and had a job offer he was about to begin," his father said.

"It's not like him to take off like this."

He could have gone out for headache medicine. If someone was broken down on the side of the road, he would have stopped and helped them. He has done that before, his father speculated.

Stan Howard said his son likes to go to parks to be alone, so the family has searched all the parks and beaches they can think of.

After he was reported missing, his family traveled for miles up and down the highways and the canyon roads looking for signs of a car going off the side. They also left fliers at airports around Southern California asking pilots to look around when they are in the air to see if they spot the car.

Anyone with information is encouraged to contact Thousand Oaks detectives: (805) 494-8201.