EAST LANSING, Mich. – Brendan Santo was missing for 84 days before his body was found in the Red Cedar River.
Police said he was visiting the Michigan State University campus for a football game when he vanished. His death was ruled an accidental drowning, but there are still many questions left unanswered.
Local 4 Investigator Karen Drew obtained the autopsy report, police reports, and spoke with a medical examiner who said this case would have been best left undetermined, not closed.
Karen Drew’s full coverage on this case includes interviews with a medical examiner and private investigator. The story begins airing at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, on Local 4 and Local 4+.
Here’s a look at the case so far:
The search for Brendan Santo
Brendan Santo, 18, was a Grand Valley State University freshman who was visiting friends in East Lansing the weekend of a University of Michigan vs. Michigan State University football game.
He was last seen on Friday, Oct. 29, 2021, on campus, leaving Yakeley Hall and walking near Michigan Avenue and Beal Street shortly before midnight. Police believed that he intended to walk back to the Brody Neighborhood, which was less than a half mile west southwest of where he was. Santo did not make it to Brody.
Why isn’t there security footage? Michigan State University said some of the surveillance cameras on campus were not working the night Santo vanished. Officials said the chips in the cameras had to be removed per the federal government earlier in the summer because they were banned.
Police said Santo’s cellphone pinged near the Red Cedar River, which runs through campus. In the weeks that followed his disappearance, family members, police, and volunteers organized several searches. They searched the surrounding area on campus, with the Red Cedar River being the primary focus.
Michigan State Police’s dive team repeatedly searched the river, which was reportedly three feet higher than normal when Santo went missing. These searches were made difficult by depth, visibility, obstacles, and underwater entanglement hazards.
During the search, the reward for information leading to his location climbed to $20,000.
---> Search for Brendan Santo nears 3 months after disappearance on Michigan State campus
Brendan Santo’s body recovered from river
Private investigator Ryan Robison is the one who found Santo’s body. He had never worked a case such as that one, but his wife followed Santo’s story closely on social media and asked him to get involved.
---> Watch: Extended interview with private investigator who found Brendan Santo’s body
Robison told Local 4 in a 2022 interview that it was a five-hour-long talk with Santo’s dad that bonded them as fathers. The 48-year-old private investigator started his search on Jan. 6, about 100 yards downstream from the Clippert Street Trailhead. For 14 bitter cold days in January, Robison spent much of his time at the river.
During one of his searches, he noticed several pumpkins that were collecting in a certain part of the river. He focused his efforts in that area. He took pictures underwater. On Jan. 20, he was going through his photos and saw something that stopped him in his tracks.
“It was like 11 p.m. that night, and I’m sitting downstairs and I’m looking through the frames,” Robison said. “I knew what Brendan was wearing that night, and probably the most identifiable aspect of that would have been this, the type of shoes he wore. So I was able to see, in that one frame, the shoes that he had on.”
After 84 days, Brendan Santo had been located.
His body was recovered from the Red Cedar River at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. He was about one and a half miles from where he was last seen, in the part of the river under US-127.
Medical examiners ruled Santo’s death as an accidental drowning, with alcohol being a contributing factor.