“Stop Calling Me”: The Bizarre Disappearance of Jeremy Lawrence
On the evening of August 20, 2023, Debbie Lawrence picked up her phone for what she thought would be a simple check-in with her son. Jeremy, 39, was riding an ATV home from a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, to Mountain Iron, about 60 miles north. He should have been home by then. She called again and again. Finally, around 10 p.m., he picked up. Before she could say a word, he said, “Stop calling,” and hung up.
It was the last time anyone in his family heard his voice.
More than two years later, Jared and Cade of the search group Adventure With a Purpose drove north to the Iron Range to meet Debbie. She and several others had reached out to the team over the years. Jared apologized for how long it had taken. The team rarely travels that far north, and there are thousands of cases waiting. Jeremy’s case was also different from the ones they usually take on, because he disappeared on a four-wheeler, not in a car. But that gave them some hope, Jared told her. If they could find the four-wheeler, they could find Jeremy.
“That’s what I’m hoping for,” Debbie said.
The Last Day
Debbie explained how it began. A few days before he vanished, Jeremy rode down to Duluth because his girlfriend, Bethany, was in labor with their daughter. Debbie was at a class reunion at the time and offered to give him a ride, but he told her he was already halfway there on the four-wheeler. He had made that trip before, so she wasn’t too worried.
He arrived safely. Over the next days, he kept in touch, texting and calling and sending pictures when the baby was born. Jeremy also had two other children, who were staying with Debbie. On August 20, he told her he was coming home.
Around midday, he said he needed money for gas. Debbie sent some through Venmo, then a little more when he asked. He left the hospital around 5:30 p.m. He was spotted on Rice Lake Road heading north, and at about 6:30 he was seen at the QuikTrip gas station on Rice Lake Road in Duluth.
At 7:26, Debbie texted to ask what was up and when he would be home. At about 7:30, Jeremy was captured on video at a restaurant at Island Lake, along County Road 4. It is the last confirmed sighting of him. Debbie thought he might have stopped there to use the Wi-Fi, since that was roughly when his last texts came through.
He replied to her with his usual vague sarcasm: “How close do you think I am?” When she said she didn’t know, he told her it would be a while. Then he wrote, “I’ll call you in a bit.” That was around 7:39.
He never called. Debbie sent four more texts through the night without an answer. Around 9 or 9:30, thinking he should be home by then, she started calling. Maybe he couldn’t hear the phone over the engine, she thought. She called and called. Then, around 10 p.m., he suddenly answered, said “Stop calling,” and hung up.
She thought it was strange. Maybe he was with someone, she guessed. She waited a little and called again. He didn’t answer. Around 11 p.m., his phone went dead.
She never heard from him again. She later sent him more money on Venmo, just to see if he would take it. He never did. His bank accounts were never touched. His phone stayed off, and Jeremy, she said, could not live without his phone. She started worrying right away. The next day she called the Duluth police, since Duluth was where he was last seen, and that is why the Duluth department has the case.
In the months that followed, Debbie received strange phone calls and heard a flood of rumors. She no longer knew what to believe. “I still have no idea what happened,” she said. “Not even a clue.”
Building the Map
Jared laid everything out on a map. He pointed out that having a girlfriend who had just given birth, along with another woman in his life, could have created tension. Debbie also suspected that Jeremy had relapsed. She knew he had been using meth, and she believed another woman, Tanya, was his connection to that world. Tanya had emailed Jared before the search, describing Jeremy as her boyfriend and saying he had gone missing after an ATV ride from Duluth to the Iron Range.
Jared worked through the timing. That kind of four-wheeler tops out around 35 to 40 miles per hour. From Island Lake, Jeremy still had 40 to 50 miles to cover. That left about two hours between roughly 8 p.m. and the 10 p.m. call, which was enough time to get close to home. The question was where he was headed: to Debbie’s house, to a friend named Devin, or to Tanya’s.
If he was heading toward Debbie’s, Jared reasoned, he might have crossed the Virginia High Bridge and cut through town on back streets to avoid police, since he was riding an ATV. There were only two bodies of water in Virginia where he might have ended up. That was where the search would begin.
The First Day
At the first lake in Virginia, the team tested the depth with a small sonar ball before launching the boat. It read 17 feet just off the road, a spot where a rider coming off the bridge and flying around a turn could easily lose control. Jared knew that feeling. He had lost control of four-wheelers himself.
Almost as soon as the boat touched the water, the sonar showed something that looked like wheels sticking up. Jared thought it might be a four-wheeler, since an ATV going into the water would likely land no more than 15 feet from shore. But as they moved closer, the shape became clearer. It was a four-door car in about 13 feet of water. It wasn’t what they were looking for. Nearby, another object five to seven feet long caught his eye, but there were no wheels or handlebars, and the sonar wouldn’t lock onto anything solid. They ruled it out.
While they were on the water, Debbie got Tanya on the phone. Tanya said Jeremy had been in contact with her that night, but he wasn’t planning to come to her house. He was heading back to Virginia. She wasn’t even home. She was in Eveleth. Bethany wasn’t at her house either. That meant nothing pulled Jeremy past Virginia, and the team crossed the lake in Chisholm off the list.
Jared asked about a rumor that a detective had passed on, one Debbie had heard too: that there might be foul play, and that Jeremy might have been put into one of the old mine pits. Tanya said she had heard that once. The only connection she could think of was the last person Jeremy had been seen with. While Bethany was in the hospital, Tanya said, Jeremy had been hanging out with a woman named Jamie at the Lenox Apartments, just down the road from the hospital. He owed Jamie money and had never paid her back. He had, in Tanya’s words, kind of ripped her off. Tanya said she only pieced this together afterward. She hadn’t even known he was talking to Jamie again.
Jared’s own working theory was an accident. Jeremy was on a back road no one knew he had taken, at night, possibly without working lights. He was cold, tired, and wanted to get home. But at 10 p.m., he was still on the phone, still out somewhere, and telling his mother to stop calling. It was as if he was in the middle of something.
The team kept moving. One pond was too shallow. At another, there was too much ground before the river, and a rider would have hit a tree first. The bottom was visible all the way across. A barrier blocked another. Another spot along Highway 4 was only two feet deep, and anything there would be sticking out of the water.
Jared called the sergeant who had been working with Debbie. He explained that they had cleared the lake in Virginia, found a car but no ATV, and would work everything along Highway 4 back down to Island Lake. He promised to share the team’s search map. A red mark meant a location was 100 percent clear. Purple meant something of concern. If he couldn’t clear a place completely, he would say so and explain why.
At Island Lake, Jared looked for what a crash would leave behind: broken limbs, flattened brush, pieces of yellow plastic. There was nothing. The vegetation was all standing.
A Stolen Four-Wheeler
Somewhere along the drive, a detail surfaced that Cade hadn’t heard before. The four-wheeler Jeremy was riding was reported stolen, though no one knew that until after he disappeared. Not Tanya, not Bethany, no one.
It was also in rough shape. It had a flat tire, and a tree or branch had fallen on it a day or two before he left Duluth, which may explain why the headlight was broken. Jeremy had also spray-painted part of the yellow ATV black, perhaps to make it look different. Still, he had driven it all the way down to Duluth and back up Rice Lake Road. Jared raised a question he didn’t want to chase too far: what if the owner had caught up with him?
He was more focused on timing. If Jeremy had kept riding north for nearly two hours, he would not have stopped in the empty stretch between the gas station and the area near home, except maybe for fuel, and he never appeared on another camera. He was out on back roads at dusk, possibly heading toward a friend’s place, toward Highway 7 or Highway 53, or toward home.
At one roadside pond with no guardrail at all, Jared said it was an easy accident spot. A rider would fly off and land in the reeds. The water was eight feet deep on one side and over six on the other. The sonar showed nothing.
At another spot, near a bridge, Cade threw a magnet line and nearly snagged the overhead power lines, adjusting his throw at the last second when Jared shouted. They laughed about it, then got serious. The sonar had picked up something near the second set of bridge supports that looked like it might be upside down with wheels. Cade dropped the magnet about six feet down and dragged it until he felt something. It was a log, about three feet wide. Jared scanned it again from another angle. Clear.
At a boat launch where a floating helmet-shaped object turned out to be nothing, the water was only two feet deep, too shallow to hide an ATV.
A Local With Answers
At another stop, a local man named Joe pulled over. He drives through the area almost every day and had watched the team’s videos. When Jared mentioned Jeremy, Joe immediately said, “The yellow four-wheeler.”
Joe shared something useful. The lake there is drawn down about five feet every winter once the ice forms. The small bays and ponds along the road turn nearly dry, and the ice folds and caves in. If an ATV were in those shallow spots, someone probably would have seen it. Jared kept checking anyway, but between the sonar, the heavy lily pads, and Joe’s knowledge, he was comfortable marking those spots clear.
The Dead Zone
By late afternoon, the team realized something important. Between Island Lake and the area farther north, there was almost no cell service. They had lost their own signal for long stretches. That explained the long silence after 7:39 p.m. Jeremy had likely been riding through a dead zone for an hour and a half to two hours, and only reached service again when he was much closer to home. That was when Debbie finally got through, around 10 p.m.
That changed the search. Lakes south of Island Lake made little sense, because Jeremy would have had to turn around and head back toward Duluth. Unless he was returning to the hospital or to Jamie’s apartment, there was no reason to do that on a four-wheeler after riding so far north. And since he had been on the phone two hours later, he had clearly not gone into the water right after leaving Island Lake.
By then, Jared believed, Jeremy was near Virginia or Eveleth. He had been calling Tanya, who was in Eveleth, but she wasn’t taking his calls or letting him come over. With a broken headlight, he might have stayed on Highway 4 rather than Highway 53. The team chose two final spots for the day: one right off Highway 53, and one along a side road a rider might take to avoid the highway.
At Halfway Lake, the sonar picked up a tire and a busted-up rim, sheared off as if from a crash. For a moment it looked like a four-wheeler wheel. On closer inspection, it was a Nissan tire that had been there a long time. The water was eight feet deep in only one small section before turning into thick weeds and shallows. The boat could barely push through. It was cleared without needing a dive.
The last lake of the night, off Miller Trunk Road, reached 28 feet deep in places. They found a root ball and a fallen tree, but nothing else.
The Call to Debbie
That evening, Jared called Debbie. “We have a lot of answers for you as to where Jeremy is not,” he told her. They had not found him yet. He explained the dead zone and why he now believed Jeremy had made it closer to home before the “Stop calling” call. He would update the map that night and plan the next day’s search around it.
He also asked a question no one had asked before. Was Jeremy working at the time? Could he have been heading to a job site?
Debbie said he was self-employed, running a snowplowing and lawn care business. The ATV, she explained, belonged to one of his clients. Jeremy had been given a key and was allowed to drive it, though not for as long as he had it. No one complained until after he went missing. Then, suddenly, the owner said it was stolen. “He didn’t initially steal it,” she said, “but he shouldn’t have had it as long as he had it.”
Jeremy had kept much of his equipment at a house in Chisholm, on Meadowbrook, where he and Tanya had lived. A man who lived in that house ended up with Jeremy’s work truck. Jeremy said he had sold it to him, but Debbie always felt something was strange about it. She didn’t know if it had to do with money he owed.
Jared asked one more thing. Debbie had mentioned that the house later burned down. When? Within about the last year, she said, long after Jeremy disappeared. Neither of them saw it as connected to a cover-up.
“If you have anything, I’ll be up late,” Jared said. “Feel free to call or text.”
“Thank you for everything,” Debbie said.
The Second Day
The next morning, the team focused farther north, closer to home. One location made more sense than anything they had seen so far: a boat ramp right beside the road, where the water came close to the pavement. But the vegetation was so thick that Jared could only mark it 95 percent clear. They moved on to Mud Lake, and then to Silver Lake.
At Silver Lake, Jared’s confidence surged. Looking at the layout, he said he would bet the farm that this was the place.
The sonar picked up something about 40 feet to the right of the boat. It was a vehicle, but not an ATV. By its shape, Jared believed it was a car from the 1960s.
It was not what they had come for, but they would not leave it unexamined. The team prepared to dive on the car for local law enforcement, to identify exactly what it was and to make sure no one was inside.
Jeremy Lawrence has still not been found. More than two years after he hung up on his mother on a dark road somewhere on Minnesota’s Iron Range, the yellow four-wheeler and the man riding it remain missing, and his family is still waiting for answers.
