Brian Carrick

Case background and investigation

Brian Carrick was a 17-year-old junior at Johnsburg High School in McHenry County, Illinois. According to ABC News, he was the 11th of 14 children, and his family lived on Johnsburg Road across the street from Val's Foods, the town's grocery store, where he and several of his siblings worked as stock clerks.

December 20, 2002 was his day off, but ABC News reported that he went to the store that evening, passing his brother on the way in. The Northwest Herald places the last sighting at about 6:45 p.m. His mother learned the next day that he had not turned up for work. Hundreds of volunteers and several police agencies searched the area, and the store offered a $25,000 reward. According to the Northwest Herald, blood identified as Carrick's was found in and around the store's produce cooler and on boxes in a compactor behind the building, and investigators concluded that a crime had taken place in the cooler.

Investigators came to believe the disappearance was connected to a drug debt, ABC News reported. Mario Casciaro, a fellow stock clerk whose father co-owned the store, was charged with perjury in 2007 over his grand jury testimony and was acquitted in 2009. Another employee, Robert Render, was charged with concealing a homicide; that charge was dropped, and he died in 2012, according to ABC News.

In 2010 a third former employee, Shane Lamb, who was facing a prison term in a cocaine case, gave prosecutors a statement in exchange for immunity and a reduced sentence. He said Casciaro had asked him to confront Carrick about money and that he had struck Carrick. Casciaro was charged with murder in February 2010. His first murder trial ended with a hung jury in 2012. A second jury convicted him in April 2013 of first-degree murder by intimidation, and he was sentenced to 26 years. Casciaro has always maintained his innocence.

Lamb recanted in 2014, saying his account had been false. On September 17, 2015, the Illinois Second District Appellate Court unanimously reversed the conviction, finding the evidence too weak to support guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and Casciaro was released from Menard Correctional Center on September 23, 2015, ABC News reported. According to Wikipedia, the Illinois Supreme Court left the reversal in place in March 2016; Casciaro later filed a civil rights suit, reached settlements with the county state's attorney's office and Johnsburg police, and became a licensed attorney in 2019.

No one stands convicted in the case. Carrick's mother died in 2009 and his father in 2014 without learning where their son is, the Northwest Herald reported on the 20th anniversary of the disappearance. His remains have not been found.