How a Chance Encounter—and a DNA Sample—Helped Find a Missing College Student After 51 Years

Douglas Brick’s family went more than five decades without answers. Little was known about what happened to the 23-year-old, who was in his fourth year of studying physics at the University of Utah when he left his dorm room on October 12, 1973.

Brick’s whereabouts remained a mystery, in part because there were no police records on file about his disappearance. Not only had Brick’s dormmate reported him missing, but Brick’s sister called university dispatch in 2018 about her missing brother, to no avail.

“We were trying to gather as much as we could. This was 50 years ago, so finding certain things was really difficult. The only records we had were his college transcripts,” Major Heather Sturzenegger of the University of Utah’s Department of Public Safety tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

That is, until 2022, when the university hired crime data analyst Nikol Mitchell. Mitchell accessed the Statewide Information and Analysis Center and learned of a cold case at the college that dated back at least 20 years. Sturzenegger then formally reopened the case and aimed to find Brick that year.

Investigators acknowledge that happenstance played a major role in solving Brick’s disappearance and giving closure to his family.

There were rumors of Brick quitting school and moving to Ogden to start anew, leaving the country, or vanishing in the foothills behind the university. However, records showed Brick was not doing well academically, and notes he wrote to his mother and girlfriend suggested he was depressed and felt like a failure.

“[Brick’s girlfriend] was able to provide us with what was happening between them in 1973,” Sturzenegger, who was an investigations lieutenant when she took on Brick’s case, says. “Brick had gone out to Texas to ask her to marry him. She told him she wanted him to graduate from college before she married him. We believe that was heartbreaking for him. He didn't know what to do.”

Brick’s mother died in 2010, not knowing what happened to her son. Still, her journal entries offered vital details to law enforcement officials who revisited the case in 2022. An entry from 1990 recalled an encounter Brick’s mother had in the ‘80s with a cashier who claimed to be a psychic. The psychic told Brick’s mother that “he was waiting for her to find him in the mountains behind the university,” according to Sturzenegger.

“[The cashier] also told her that he said that he went into the mountains to kill himself, but he had changed his mind and had fallen and couldn't get out,” Sturzenegger continues. “We didn't have a report from the ‘80s, either. That was only something she wrote in her journal.”

The purported psychic’s retrocognition gave investigators pause, but was it enough to find Brick?

Upon reopening the case, authorities learned of the call Brick’s sister made to university police in 2018. Detective Jon Dial traveled to California to get DNA from Brick’s sister. Her sample did not match anyone in the national system, meaning there were no unidentified remains on file that belonged to Brick.

Sturzenegger zeroed in on the case in December 2022, when she accompanied her daughter to an unrelated doctor’s appointment. The doctor, Steven Warren, had struck up a conversation about her line of work.

“He told me he graduated from the University of Utah. He asked me what I did at the university, and I told him that I worked for the police department, and he said, ‘Well, that's interesting because my roommate went missing in 1973, and I never knew what happened to him,’” Sturzenegger says.

Warren had alerted police, school officials and Brick’s family to his disappearance early on. After Brick vanished, Warren got his school schedule and went to all his classes in hopes of finding him. Warren contacted university police a few days later, after finding Brick’s abandoned car on campus.

“Warren told us he was standing there when they opened up his car,” Sturzenegger says. “Douglas had packed basically all of his belongings very neatly in the back of his car and in his trunk. It included his wallet, his IDs and all his clothing. Everything he owned was in his car.”

Warren also told investigators where the initial search for Brick took place. That information proved significant years later when a random discovery broke the case wide open.

In October 2024, hunters near the peak of Black Mountain found human skull fragments on top of some brush. The remains were located six miles from where Brick vanished in 1973. University officials said an anthropologist at the college ultimately confirmed the age of the degraded bones.

“When someone's body is in the elements for a significant period of time, it can get washed away and blown around as it disintegrates,” Jennifer Shen, former crime laboratory director of the San Diego Police Department, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Animals can also disrupt the body, and body parts and bones can be spread out a good distance. A body that's been out in the elements for decades is very unlikely to be pristine and in one location. It’s particularly unlikely if it hadn't been buried or protected from the elements in some manner.”

The latest development especially piqued Sturzenegger’s interest, as she recalled Warren telling them that the original search for Brick took place not far from where the unidentified skull fragments were discovered. University police sent the bones to a specialized lab. Five months later, the results came: The skull belonged to Brick.

“DNA is such a powerful tool that we can extract it from the smallest piece of bone from a body that has been in the elements for years,” Shen says. “We can develop a profile and compare it either to a database or a missing person's family to provide them with closure.”

Despite finding his remains, “we don't know exactly what happened” to Brick, Sturzenegger admits. “There was no damage to his skull. We did go back up into the mountains and searched the area where the skull was. We didn't find anything else.”

Brick’s disappearance marks the first and only known cold case at the University of Utah. While university police said early on that they plan to investigate how Brick died, the case is closed, as foul play is not suspected in his death.

Brick’s mother died before learning what happened to her son, but police were able to provide closure to his surviving relatives. The family thanked police for their work in a statement issued to the University of Utah in May 2025.

“They buried his remains between his parents in Pocatello, Idaho, where he was from,” Sturzenegger says. “We went to the funeral and supported them through all of that. ”