Have You Seen This Man?

Adam Sennott

*Special thanks to Nick Malave for helping locate members of the homeless community who may have been near the Boston Marriott Long Wharf Hotel the morning of Eugene Losik’s disappearance. Unfortunately Spare Change was only able to find one man who may have been in the area at the time, though he said he did not see anything unusual. The man declined to formally comment for fear of giving a false statement.

He is 5’11”, features a muscular build, blue eyes, and shaved blond hair. He has a blue tribal flame tattoo above his right bicep, and was last seen wearing a grey T-shirt, blue jeans and black dress shoes. There is a $10,000 reward for any information which leads to his whereabouts.  

Eugene Losik, a 25-year-old electrical engineer for Raytheon, was last seen leaving the Boston Marriott Long Wharf Hotel at 2:24 A.M. on Saturday, February 20th. He was staying at the hotel with his fiancé and a group of friends, with whom he had celebrated a birthday party at Sissy K’s near Faunal Hall earlier that night. Despite an intensive search of nearby Christopher Columbus Park and the surrounding harbor that involved 50 divers, sonar equipment and low flying helicopters, nothing was discovered and Losik remains missing.

 

Losik is described by friends and family as an all around good guy who cared about his friends and liked to make people laugh. According to Losik’s mother, he had no past history of depression and was subject to random drug testing at Raytheon where he worked.

“He’s working for Raytheon and there doing random checkups of their employees,” said Zhanna Losik, Eugene’s mother. “So it’s out of the question, he would never ever have jeopardized his job.”

As a testing engineer for Raytheon’s Patriot Systems, which Raytheon’s website states is “the world’s most advanced air and missile defense system,” Losik is said to have loved his job, and was even being considered for a promotion.

“He really loved what he was doing,” said Rick Keilty, a longtime friend of Losik’s. “I don’t know what he was working on, but I know he was working with electrical components, which was like his love in college.”

The night before Eugene disappeared he, along with his fiancée and a group of friends, checked into the Boston Marriott Long Wharf Hotel around 8:30 P.M. On their way in Losik made an interesting observation to the group.

“As we were walking into the hotel—it was Gene, our friend and I—and we were walking in and Gene looked at the water and he was like ‘God that looks like black concrete, it looks like asphalt, why would anyone want to go near that water? It’s kind of eerie looking,” said Caitlin McGovern, Losik’s fiancée.

According to McGovern, the two arrived at Sissy K’s around 10:20 P.M. Losik consumed three drinks while he was there.

“I wasn’t really drinking at all, I had given up alcohol for Lent. I think I remember [Gene] having three drinks while were there,” said McGovern. “He had a shot of Jager, a rum and coke, and a kamikaze.”

Around midnight, Eugene left the bar to check on a friend who had gone outside. However, the bouncer would not let him back in because he felt that Eugene was already too intoxicated. McGovern believes he may have just had too much too drink too fast.

“The bouncer thought that Gene was too intoxicated to come back in,” said McGovern. “But I think he just drank to much to quickly while he was there because he really didn’t drink a lot. He only had three drinks, but he drank them in a short span because we didn’t drink as soon as we walked in there or anything. So that’s why we left [Sissy K’s].”

After the bouncer did not let Losik back into the bar, the group left and returned to the Boston Marriott Long Wharf Hotel, where they had rented two rooms. Losik and McGovern were sharing a room with two other friends.

“I had gone to bed around midnight, and then he had stayed up with several of our friends and just played cards,” said McGovern. “They weren’t drinking at all, they were just playing cards.”

Before they began playing, Losik and Keilty had gone for a walk through Christopher Columbus Park and eventually down the street to pick up a deck of cards at a nearby 7/11. Keilty said that they did not go near the docks which cadaver dogs would later lead to.

“Gene and I went out for a walk after we got back [from Sissy K’s]. We actually had a trip planned for the next week—we were all supposed to go to Cancun together. We had just booked the tickets the week prior, so we were chatting about that,” said Keilty. “He really seemed good, in good spirits nothing out of the ordinary at all.”

Keilty also said, “We went around…kind of all over. There’s Christopher Columbus Park in back where he disappeared, we walked back there. But mostly around, I think it’s Atlantic Ave, that area.”

Shortly after returning from their walk, Keilty decided it was time for him to go home, and went down stairs to get a cab to take him to his residence in Brighton.

 “We got back to the hotel and then I took off to go back to my apartment,” Keilty said. “I live in Brighton, I took off about 2:15 [A.M] to head back to my place.”

Losik was seen walking Keilty downstairs to get a cab. A few minutes after leaving Keilty, Losik was recorded by the hotel cameras as walking back outside the hotel without his jacket or cigarettes.

“The cameras saw him leaving the hotel about 10-15 minutes later coming out the back door,” Keilty said. “And then that is the last anyone has seen him at all, or heard any word of his whereabouts.”

Though no one is exactly sure why Losik walked outside of the hotel at 2:24 A.M., a text message was sent from Keilty to both McGovern and Losik, letting them know he had fun and was looking forward to their next trip. However, McGovern believes Losik’s phone had not been charged and may have gone dead around that time. McGovern suggests he may have only seen who sent the message and walked outside to make sure everything was okay with his friend.

“Rick sent us a text message, sent Gene and I a text message that just said, ‘really looking forward to North Conway in a couple of weeks, had a great time tonight. Goodnight,” said McGovern. “I got the text message. Gene’s phone received the text message, but his phone we believe may have died shortly after.”

McGovern continued, “We received the text message at 2:18 [A.M.] and at [2:24] Gene is seen leaving the Marriot Hotel. So I was thinking maybe he saw the text message but his phone died before he could open it and he only saw who it was from, and because he had just walked Rick out maybe he was just walking out to make sure Rick was okay.”

According to McGovern, Losik’s phone company stated that his phone did receive the text message. However, by the time the phone company looked into the matter, it was too late to utilize the GPA tracker inside the phone.

Apparently, it wasn’t a rare occurrence for Losik to go outside when he couldn’t sleep. When he did, he usually wound up at Keilty’s house. “[Gene’s] a bit of a night owl, and on occasion he would go to our friend Rick’s house in Brighton,” McGovern said. “He would take a cab over there and hang out with Rick, but he would always leave me a note or call to let me know he was doing that. This time there was no note or call.”

However, on one such occasion where Losik wound up at Keilty’s house he did not take a cab. Instead he chose to get a ride from a complete stranger, something which McGovern says she made him promise never to do again.

“It was Halloween,” said McGovern. “He said that he was going to stay up with friends and I said
‘no problem,’ and he said, ‘I might go over to Rick’s,’ and I said ‘okay’ and I went to bed. He and another friend of ours went out to look for a cab spent like an hour trying to find a cab. And someone pulled over and said, ‘where are you guys headed,’ and ‘I will give you a ride.’ And Gene felt like he was a big enough guy and secure enough that he and our friend could go to Rick’s house in this stranger’s car.”

McGovern continued, “Of course when he came back I screamed and yelled at him about how silly that was, how dangerous and ridiculous, and he promised me he would never do it again. But Gene is very secure with himself, and very confident that he could protect himself.”

Though he would usually go to Keilty’s house, Losik would also sometimes go out for walks and would talk to people along the way, usually asking if he could have a cigarette as a way of breaking the ice.

“He is very, very friendly. So he would go and talk to people, and if he was bored he would go outside and try and start up a conversation with somebody,” McGovern said. “His way of doing that may have been, because he is a smoker, to go and ask for cigarettes.”

Though Losik had been drinking that night, and was deemed too intoxicated to re-enter Sissy K’s, McGovern said that security cameras indicated he was sobering up before he disappeared, nearly two and a half hours after they had left the bar.

“You see Gene walking in and out on the security cameras of the hotel after [leaving Sissy K’s],” said McGovern. “So you see him walking out at like one o’clock in the morning, at 1:30 in the morning, getting progressively better.”

The next morning however, McGovern awoke to realize everything wasn’t fine. “I woke up at 6 A.M. and he wasn’t there,” McGovern said. “I immediately called Rick because Rick is his best friend, so it’s not unusual for him to just got and hang out with Rick.”

However, this time Gene did not make it to Keilty’s house, and there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that was where he was going when he stepped out of the hotel.

Later the next morning, on February 21st, Keilty came back to the hotel when he learned that his friend was missing. Meanwhile, Eugene’s fiancée began the search.

“I left the hotel around 6:30 [A.M.],” said McGovern. “I walked outside and started looking around, maybe thinking that he was locked out of the hotel room, looked around the hotel, looked around outside in the park, looked around the waterfront.  I couldn’t find him anywhere.”

After searching the hotel and surrounding areas, McGovern and Keilty began to realize that something was seriously wrong. At 10 A.M. McGovern went to the Boston Police Department to file a missing persons report, an ordeal which she says took more then an hour.

“Around 10 A.M. I went to their police station. I filed a report even though they gave me a really hard time about filing a report,” McGovern said. “Luckily [a Boston Police Lieutenant] walked by and said, ‘you need to take her report, take her report.’ But it took them like an hour to take my report.”

While they did get the report filed, their struggle to get Losik’s disappearance taken seriously was not over. McGovern recounts, “I had called [Eugene’s mother] to tell her. [She] called and said that she had called the police station and couldn’t get a case number for the report, that they said they didn’t have it,” McGovern continued to describe the confusion, saying, “I had gone back to the police station and said I had filed this report I need the case number and his mother can’t find the case number. The dispatcher at the desk said that he couldn’t find it on file. Then a sergeant who had been there while I was filing the report was walking by and he said, ‘oh here it is.’ And he pulled it out from out of a stack of paper work, like at the bottom of paper work.”

Even more alarming were the glaring inaccuracies within the report the police had filed, and their unwillingness the change these inaccuracies, many of which appeared in the local media.

“I took it and I was like, well this is incorrect, [Eugene] did not have a coat on,” McGovern said. “Then I was like, is there anyway to update your system at all to reflect that he didn’t have a coat, that it’s the middle of February, he walked outside in just a T-shirt, this is what happened. They assured me that they would, but it somehow didn’t get updated.”

 At around 8:30 P.M. the detective for the Boston Police Department who had been assigned case arrived at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf Hotel. When he realized that Losik had indeed left the hotel early that morning without a jacket, the massive search began in earnest.

“They did a canvas search,” said McGovern. “So they were searching in alley ways and dumpsters, unfortunately, and basically started the focal point of the hotel and just spanned outward into the park and down the wharf, and towards the aquarium and all of those things. And found nothing.”

After a large search of the surrounding area turned up nothing, the police then turned their attention to the water. According to McGovern, the following Saturday a private search dog was brought in to smell the area, followed by a cadaver search dog from the Boston Police Department. The latter led the search party to a dock right next to Christopher Columbus Park.

McGovern remembered, “They had divers from Quincy and Everett and other surrounding neighborhoods. There were 50 divers in the water searching everywhere. They had the U.S Coast Guard looking in the water. They were using specialized radar, which maps the bottom of the ocean and uncovering anything that they couldn’t recognize. They had state police with helicopters looking above the water, looking at harbor islands, looking everywhere.”

Although the search for Losik was intense, he remains missing. Police were unable to find any evidence of his whereabouts either in the water or on land. According to a website known as Footprints At The River’s Edge, which tracks the disappearances of college-age men throughout the United States and Canada, two other people have also disappeared in Boston under similar circumstances.

According to Footprints At The River’s Edge, the first incident occurred on March 16, 2007. Dustin Willis, a 26 year old Navel Officer docked in Boston for St. Patrick’s Day weekend, disappeared from the Black Rose Restaurant in Quincy Market during a blizzard around 1 A.M. Shortly thereafter, Willis’ cell phone was found near Long Wharf. On March 21, four days after he disappeared, his body was found at the end of Long Wharf.

The second case, according to Footprints At The River’s Edge, occurred on October 8, 2009. William Hurley, a retired Navel Veteran studying for his Masters’ degree in teaching at the University of Massachusetts Boston, disappeared while waiting for his girlfriend to pick him after attending a Bruins game at the TD Garden. Hurley’s cell phone was found smashed, and nearly a week after he disappeared his body was discovered in the Charles River near the Nashua Street Jail.

While both of these cases are similar tragedies, no evidence suggests that they are connected in anyway. Meanwhile, Eugene Losik remains missing.

“The Boston Police Department continues the search for Eugene Losik,” said Officer James Kenneally,
Boston Police Spokesperson. “At this point in the investigation we would encourage anybody who may know something, may have seen something or have information pertaining to his whereabouts, we urge and ask those individuals to come forward and help us in out efforts to locate him.”

For more information on the disappearance of Eugene Losik, or to make a donation to supports efforts to locate him please visit, http://www.findgenelosik.com/.