Rudolph "Rudy" Farias IV was, by all accounts, a normal teenaged boy.
He liked hanging out with his friends, taking walks in the park — sometimes by himself — and he loved his two dogs.
Like many kids, he was asthmatic, but he didn't let that stop him, nor did his injured right leg, which gave him a slight limp.
But Rudy also suffered from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. At one point, he attempted suicide.
His March 2015 disappearance and subsequent discovery in June this year shocked the Houston, Texas, community and the whole nation.
The missing poster for the then-17-year-old boy paints an endearing picture of his life but also his afflictions.
Published by Texas EquuSearch, one of the organisations that scoured the city for Rudy when he went missing, the flyer reads: "It is possible he is disoriented as he has not been taking his medication. ... According to his mother, he is very wary around strangers."
Rudy's last known location at the time of his disappearance was near Tidwell and Park drives in Houston. He had been walking his dogs at around 6:30pm on Friday, March 6, 2015, and was wearing blue jeans, a black T-shirt, gray cotton gloves and brown shoes, the flier says.
Authorities found the dogs immediately after beginning their investigation, but Rudy wasn't with them.
He was eventually found on a stoop behind a local church, unresponsive, with several cuts and bruises and blood in his hair.
That was on Thursday, June 29 — more than eight years after his disappearance.
When first responders arrived and examined Rudy, he was in bad shape and was completely non-verbal, leading the police to suspect abuse. He also curled into a fetal position any time the authorities or his mother, Janie Santana, tried to talk to him.
He was taken to a local hospital, then released into his mother's care.
But where has Rudy been the last eight years? And what happened to him?
Theories surrounding Rudy's disappearance
Several theories are floating around regarding the circumstances of Rudy's disappearance.
One of the main ones, and the one police immediately jumped to when they found him, is that the now-25-year-old was kidnapped and abused.
From the cuts and bruises on his body to the blood in his hair, it's clear that Rudy went through some sort of trauma, or, at the very least, had a rough experience of some sort.
It was the way he curled into a fetal position and remained entirely non-verbal every time someone attempted to speak to him, however, that led his mother Janie and authorities to suspect abuse.
That's a theory Janie has been running with since as early as 2017, just two years after he went missing.
At the time, she spoke with ABC13 and told the outlet that she felt there was something suspicious about his disappearance and had started to fear for her own safety.
When he first went missing, there was another running theory that he had run away. He struggles with mental illnesses and never quite recovered from the death of his half-brother in 2011 in a motorcycle accident, his mother told ABC13.
His scared state after his recovery provides some foundation to that idea, as does the fact that his family said he thinks he's a 14-year-old named Julio Torres.
But that theory doesn't explain the cuts, bruises and blood.
Others speculate that the boy was living with family members or neighbours.
In 2018, Rudy's family reportedly spotted him another family's yard, living behind their home. But when the Houston police arrived, there was no one there.
The idea that has everyone babbling, however, is that he was never missing in the first place and was in fact living with Janie the entire time.
One of the family's neighbours, Kisha Ross, came forward and spoke to ABC13, telling the outlet, "He used to come in my garage, chill with my cousin, son and daughter."
"That boy has never been missing," she claims.
She said she hasn't seen Farias for weeks but asserts that he was never missing.
Some members of the Facebook group "Rudy Farias IV Discussion Group" are also weary of Janie.
Courtney Howell screenshotted her page, sharing a post Janie wrote in May 2016 that showcased the missing flyer for her son.
"She post nothing in between 2014-2016 and he went missing in 2015? Seems legit," she wrote.
Another shared a picture of a man who looks like Rudy in Janie's kitchen — though the actual origin of that photo is unverified, as is the identity of the man in it.
Stef Clossen noted that Janie constantly shares posts about Rudy's half-brother, who was killed in 2011, but almost never of Rudy.
"Something odd to me is how she always post about missing her other son that was killed in an accident and would tag him, but never about Rudy or tagged him," she wrote. "I seen one or two about Rudy which wasn’t much. The pic is from 2022, doesn’t say she misses Rudy!"
The authorities are still investigating what happened to the 25-year-old.
