Page 11 - PPIAC Newsletter Apr-May 2022

5. Contact local media (this had also already been done).
6. Notify the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
These are basically the same things as can be found in CBI’s missing person’s checklist, which I review when I get
these cases. By the time the family contacted me, they had retrieved some of Abiodun’s belongings that had been
found in a hostel locker. Included in the locker were his journal, a backpack, some drug paraphernalia, his
cellphone, and his laptop. After the family did the above, they decided to hire me to attempt to locate and extract
Abiodun from Nicaragua.

Case Preparation and Research

Local Knowledge
Whenever your investigation takes you to another geographic location, especially to another country, it’s
important to consider your level of familiarity and connection in that area. While I speak Spanish fluently, I had
never been to Nicaragua and had no connections there. I contacted a retired FBI Special Agent and a retired DEA
Special Agent, both of whom had spent multiple decades in Mexico, Central, and South America, and after
discussing the case with them, I decided to take them with me to assist with the case.

Family Interview
It’s important to interview the family to try to obtain any evidence or leads they can provide, as well as a
timeframe for the disappearance. We scheduled an interview with the family and obtained a full profile of
Abiodun’s life from them. He had graduated with a computer science degree, he had a job offer, he was a very
responsible student, brother, and son. He’d been traveling in Costa Rica and Nicaragua for approximately a month
before disappearing. He had been experimenting with ayahuasca under supervision from local shamans in Costa
Rica. He was very good at communicating with the family while he was gone. He was a strong swimmer and had
been on swim teams. Then one day, he just stopped responding. Shortly after that they found out that the people
he’d been spending time with had also reported him missing.

Evidence Review
We were fortunate that the family had traveled to Nicaragua to obtain his belongings, which had been found in a
locker in the hostel where he was staying. The family provided a backpack which contained the aforementioned
cellphone and laptop, his journal, as well as a pipe, a burned broken glass bottle, a small container of a brown
liquid substance, and steel wool. The family elected not to have the items analyzed for drug residue. However,
based upon the retired DEA Special Agent’s knowledge, we believed that the broken bottle, steel wool, and pipe
were likely used for cocaine, and the small container to be DMT-containing ayahuasca, which Abiodun had
referenced repeatedly in his journal.

The family also reported that in the locker there had been a half-empty bottle of rum, but they threw it away
before returning to the US. They also provided a one-page report that had been jointly written by the NNP and the
Nicaraguan Navy, stating that after dedicating many personnel, hours, equipment, etc. over the course of a month
they found no evidence of Abiodun’s whereabouts or condition, other than someone saw him go out on a kayak on
the morning of his disappearance, and that they assumed he had drowned. As a single exhibit, the NNP provided a
rudimentary map that they’d created of the lake, which indicated where the hostel was, where the kayak had been
found, etc. However, the family was concerned about the accuracy of the investigation, given the known
corruption of the NNP, and decided to hire US-based investigators for a second opinion (us). After the conclusion
of this investigation, the NNP was later listed as an OFAC-designated entity.

Research and Safety
Prior to traveling to Nicaragua, we conducted research on the current political and safety climate of the country.
We initially suspected the possibility of human trafficking, but we had provisionally ruled out kidnapping for
ransom as no one had contacted the family. The main resources we used to assess the situation in Nicaragua were:
• The CIA World Factbook